With the upcoming launch of BMC Research Notes (which will have a strong data focus) BioMed Central’s development team has been hard at work improving the handling of additional material files.

One request we have had from authors is to make it possible to upload collections of files that can be conveniently navigated in the web browser  – essentially a miniature website associated with the article. This functionality has now been added to our publication system.

To submit such a ‘mini-website’ as an additional material file, all you need to do is to ensure that the homepage is named index.html, and sits in the root folder of the content you wish to submit. Then convert the folder hierarchy into a ZIP archive, and upload this ZIP file using the regular manuscript submission system, which will recognize and process it automatically. Full guidelines are provided in each journal’s Instructions for Authors (example).

Readers of the published article will have a choice of whether to download the ZIP file to view locally on their own machine, or alternatively they can follow a link to view the contents of the ZIP file via the BioMed Central website.

Several articles already published by BioMed Central have included such mini-website zipfiles, and the data for these articles have been converted to take advantage of the functionality. See for example Additional File 1 from the following article in BMC Evolutionary Biology:

Research article
   
Natural hybridization in heliconiine butterflies: the species boundary as a continuum
Mallet J, Beltrán M, Neukirchen W, Linares M
BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, 7:28 (23 February 2007)
[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]