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Earlier this summer, Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, was busy promoting a new secondary school curriculum for teaching evolution to scientists and educators. He and his colleagues had published the program in Evolution: Education and Outreach in April, and they were eager to spread the word before the start of the upcoming school year. So when Cooper received an email from a colleague who couldn’t access his manuscript’s supplementary files because of broken hyperlinks, he was frustrated by the news.
The supplementary documents contained important information, such as the experimental protocols for students that his team had tested. This was not the first time that he’d come across issues with these types of files. “I’ve had multiple instances from multiple publishers where the supplementary material has gone missing,” he says, adding that this has occurred with both his papers and others’.
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