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I am often bothered by the fact that interesting information pertaining a manuscript ends up in the supplemental information because of constraints of space, formatting and narrative. It feels like wasting hard-earned results.

I am about to submit a paper which will be accompanied by supplemental information where I will put a very detailed analysis of some specific bit of the paper. This is too detailed to make it to the main text. Because I think they are nice results nonetheless and I would like to squeeze some juice out of them, I was thinking about putting the supplemental info as either an arXiv or Zenodo submission, which would assign it a DOI and thus make it citeable. It would make this info also more discoverable and accessible by someone who is interested in this part but not in the journal paper itself.

Is this a good idea or should I simply submit my extra data as regular supplemental info instead?

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    It is very common practice to create a MEGA version of your paper that contains all relevant material, even material that not necessary for the journal submission, to ArXiv.
    – PsySp
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 23:48
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    @PsySp Not all journals are compatible with arXiv preprints. As a matter of fact, the ones I'm considering for this paper (which are published by the American Chemical Society) are not. So putting the main text on arXiv would preclude submission to these journals.
    – Miguel
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 0:33
  • Would you be happy putting the supplemental material on a personal home page?
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 3:47
  • @aparente001 I would like the sup. info to have a DOI, that is the motivation to use a repository. My website would not offer this feature.
    – Miguel
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 11:49
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    @a3nm I feel the discussion is barking up the wrong tree. Just to be clear: most journals (at least the ones I am dealing with) do not own copyright of supplemental material, only of the main text. What I do with the supplemental material is therefore up to me. My question is about getting the most out of my supplemental info, since I would not like for it to be only reachable through some obscure link on the journal's website.
    – Miguel
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 12:09

2 Answers 2

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If the journals you want to submit your work are not "ArXiv-compatible" you have few options:

1)Put the excluded material in the appendix of the arxiv submission. 2)Make a write-up, put it on your web-page, and cite it in the arxiv paper. 3)Create a technical report (with a time stamp) and cite it in your article.

I think the time-stamp feature is critical here.

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Normally I expect that the Journal would host supplementing information. If the amoutn and content is significant (e.g. complicated new method), then publishing an extra article should be possible in another journal and referencing that. And nobody keeps you from putting the preprint online as you would do usually.

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