Share It, Reveal It, Reuse It, and Push Multimedia into a New Decade

Scientific publishing connotes a long and well-established process of sharing achieved research results through distributed articles. Publishers often critically peer review the articles to ensure that the presented results are competitive, relevant, valuable, and creditable, and that they reveal new contributions to the field. Journals like Nature or Science take this process a step further. In addition to a strong peer-review process for their scientific articles, they require the authors to reveal all relevant experimental data and test sets. The magazines state in their authors´ guidelines how to provide supplementary information about data sets, materials, methods, and so on. This policy guarantees the reliability of the results and also gives other researchers an opportunity to compare their own research on the same data grounds, since all of the data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to the readers of the magazine. For example, a recently published article in Science provides readers with extensive supplementary materials of figures, methods, tables, and references in an impressive 91-page PDF document. Unfortunately, authors rarely expose this kind of detail with their published findings.