Dear Federica,

I am afraid this is typical behaviour of the ACS - I have had many
arguments with them over the years and they are notorious for taking this
kind of stance when it comes to open availability. It is certainly ironic
that the first thing they pick up on acceptance is that if you are RCUK
funded they quote the Open Access mandate at you and ask for $4000 - they
certainly seem to heed that particular requirement.

If you don¹t want to go up against them then you can quote the DOI of the
parent article - from which the Supp Info is linked. This is not the
letter of the law as far as EPSRC state, however I have indications from
them right now that ³the spirit of the law² is what matters - and they are
aware of the fact that we have to alter a few cogs in the machine (or
spanners in the case of the ACS).

If you are up for a fight (which I would join) then a half way house would
be requiring ACS to mint independent DOIs for their Supp Info - that way
they are seen to still be in control but the author can point explicitly
at the data.

I would certainly like to ultimately be in the situation where we can mint
our own DOIs and provide them in the body of the paper and thereby rid
ourselves of the chains of organisations like the ACS - but more
importantly make Supp Info a more useful and rich and readily (re)usable
resource. 

I would value the views of this community as to if in the cases where Supp
Info is ³openly accessible² for a particular journal, it meets mandates if
it is used as the place to deposit? At this point in time, for many, it is
a pragmatic possibility (I am talking about getting my colleagues to
deposit Supp Info - it is something they already do, its in the spirit of
the mandate, it is little extra work and they are more likely to engage)Š
   
Simon.

Simon Coles. 
Associate Professor & Director, UK National Crystallography Service.
Chemistry, Faculty of Natural and Environmental Sciences,
University of Southampton.
Southampton, SO17 1BJ. UK.
+44(0)2380596721 
Staff Page: http://www.soton.ac.uk/chemistry/about/staff/sjc5.page
NCS: http://www.ncs.ac.uk <http://www.ncs.ac.uk/> | Southampton
Diffraction Centre: http://www.soton.ac.uk/sdc
ResearcherID: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-1795-2009 | ORCID:
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8414-9272





On 29/10/2015 11:56, "Research Data Management discussion list on behalf
of Federica Fina" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Hi everyone,
>
>Here in St Andrews we are having an issue with an ACS journal with
>regards to the Data Access Statement in a manuscript.
>
>In summary, one of our researchers submitted an EPSRC funded manuscript
>with the following sentence in the Supporting Information paragraph:
>³The research data supporting this publication can be accessed at [DOI]²
>
>The Journal was not happy and asked our researcher to remove the sentence
>and include the ³material² in a Word document and submit it as a
>traditional SI. This however is not possible as the raw data simply
>cannot be put into a word document, given the nature of the files. They
>also wrote the following instructions:
>
>³Supporting Information Available:
>Description of the material included.
>This material is available free of charge via the Internet
>http://pubs.acs.org. (no other URL is acceptable).²
>
>The concerning bit here is ³no other URL is acceptable² and theirs does
>not really meet the definition of unique (as per EPSRC expectations).
>
>We are trying to make the process as smooth as possible for our
>researchers but these episodes do not help the cause.
>
>Maybe the sentence could be moved among the references or in the
>acknowledgements. This, however, would make the Data Access Statement
>less evident to the reader (or EPSRC themselves)Š
>
>We contacted the journal explaining the situation but in the meantime we
>would really like to know what you think and if you have ever had such an
>experience with a publisher. If so, how did you solve it?
>
>Any advice welcome!
>
>Best wishes,
>Federica