Supplementary materialThe ability t

Supplementary materialThe ability to publish supplementary material with a journal article is of undeniable benefit. However, the lack of standards between journals, the less-than-rigorous quality control, and the inability of Web search engines to access and index much supplementary material, mean that its use is suboptimal, often being of value only in the context of the article itself.Mark-up, data, and metadata With a few shining exceptions, online journals currently provide no semantic mark-up of text that would facilitate increased understanding of the underlying meaning. Perhaps their most significant shortcomings are that there is little or no access to the data contained within them in actionable form, or to metadata describing the articles themselves.So much more could be done: while simple metadata may facilitate discovery of an article, suitable semantic mark-up of results within an article could enable automated meta-research, i.e. the undertaking of truly novel science.