Today's scholarly publishing system is full of anachronisms. While people still dwell endlessly on such prominent anachronisms as journal rankings, so far only few people are debating the anachronism of the widespread deployment of 'supplementary material'. If you are not convinced that 'supplementary material' is an anachronism, just head over to the Nature Methods website. This journal specializes in publishing scientific methods, yet you won't find any methods in the printed publications. The methods are published as supplements, which you have to download separately from the printed material. In other words, if you really want to read the essential information in Nature Methods, you can safely ignore the journal itself and head straight for the supplements. Now if this isn't absurd, I don't know what is.

Given that publishers are developing online article formats, it seems to me that the concept of 'supplements' is diametrically opposite to the way one would design a modern research article. With most researchers accessing their literature online, shouldn't the modern research article contain the full details and information together with the raw data? Personally, if I read an article online (and not just the abstract in a database), I want access to everything on the very first page of the article, and the cell.beta version linked to above comes pretty close. Since there is virtually unlimited space, there is no need for a separate supplement with additional data or methods. In most cases, what currently is in the supplement is essential information for the reader and should be worked into the publication, especially if the readability is enhanced using web-native formatting. In this context, a supplement could be written by the authors in which the research is summarized on one to three or so pages, to appear in the printed version. Some people are known to use the printed versions in very particular locations, for which concise summaries would be more adequate than more elaborate treatises anyway:



For these reasons I have now updated all the downloadable local copies of my research papers which had a supplement such that the supplement is in the same PDF file as the main text, just appended at the end. This means you get all the information with a single click, the way it should be.