In defence of supplemental data files: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

"BioMed Central takes the opposite stance to the Journal of Neuroscience. Not only do we allow authors to submit supplementary files...we positively encourage it, and we continue to look for ways to make the additional data supplied by authors as part of their articles more useful and accessible. Through our Open Data Award, introduced in 2010, we also seek to recognise authors who have shown leadership in sharing the underlying data associated with their research publication....Most importantly, by sharing the underlying data, authors are increasing transparency and promoting reproducibility – one of the foundations of science....[B]ecause BioMed Central journals are entirely online, they have no such space constraints. If material is best presented in the body of an article, authors can do this. Additional files are intended for use in sharing underlying datasets, movies, 3D-visualizations and other such material that is not easy to present within the article....The challenge, in encouraging wider data sharing, is to demonstrate how sharing data can benefit not only the research community as a whole, but also can increase the visibility, impact and citation potential of scientists’ work...."