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American Mineralogist: Journal of Earth and Planetary Materials

Note that each pull-down on the menu above contains specific and important information, including nomenclature, tables, references, CIFs, figures, paper types, and more. Please explore the whole site before submitting your paper -- the tab-based design makes it easy to find what you need instead of scrolling on and on.

Deposit Items and Data Sets

Supplementary material will be placed in MSA's free to use, free to read depository, which is located online (click on any Table of Contents, look for a deposit item and click the link). Here's an example of our data page. Starting in 2016, deposit links are located next to the issue in the TOC grid.

Almost any content, including tables, figures, and data sets may be deposited and do not have to comply with the official Am Min style guidelines. (Although CIF guidelines are strictly enforced.) In general, deposit materials will appear exactly as the author prepared them. Since deposit material is supposed to last for a long time, using plain txt, PDF, Excel, or other "universal" format is advised; but any format is accepted. It would also be beneficial to your paper, if the metadata of the item included author(s) name(s), title of the paper, and other keyword information as possible.

Submission Requirements

An electronic copy of deposit/supplementary materials, figures, tables, CIFs, additional methods information, and even movies should be uploaded to the peer review system when you submit your paper. Contact the Editorial office regarding any questions or concerns about special format files or for transmitting the files by ftp.

In most cases, the Editorial office will add the "branding" needed to identify the published version of your article. However, it is very helpful and a "best practice" for authors to put at the top of the file last name, year of publication, and American Mineralogist. Authors with many deposits will be asked to do this in the production phase if they have not.

CIFs: These data have specific requirements and are vetted in peer review. See CIF guidelines.

Supplemental Data Sets

If you deposit data related to your research in public data repositories, whether with your institution, Figshare, Dryad, or other, we will enable hyperlinks to that data if you provide an URL, especially if your funding requires that your data be deposited and linked. The format can be to simply embed this in the method's text, but it could also be treated as a reference and cited and listed as any reference. If another person's data is used, be sure to reference that in the References List, and call it out in the paper, basically as you would any citation (author(s), year, title, repository info/name, and the persistent link). The specific persistent link could be a DOI or any other format.

We encourage authors to do this; the community of science now and in the future may find the raw data or big data invaluable. Furthermore, think of your deposited data set, and our link to it, as a discovery tool for your paper. Finally, this should aid those of you with funding requirements that require linking of data to the published paper.

For Consideration:

Please consider making some Figures, Tables or even a portion of your paper "supplementary data", if you have a large paper (over 50 pages raw, counting each figure as 1 page). Very approximately, every 3 pages deposited reduces the final typeset version by 1 page. Evidence-based publishing indicates that shorter articles are more often read/cited than longer articles. And if your paper is Open Access, that reduces your APF; or your reprint costs for a regular paper. Of course MSA is interested in reducing costs; however, if the science needs the space then that is important to communicate to the editor.

A common concern about deposit materials is that readers will not click the url or the url will break in future years or the paper will just be incomplete. To solve that consider depositing the material in Dryad, Figshare, etc. -- options at the bottom of this page although are many such services and you can use the one you wish. They will supply you with an DOI -- a digital object identifier -- and you let us know what that is and we embed that into the paper. Many advantages -- the DOI will always work, the material is linked to you and to the paper, the deposit material is not under embargo of any sort, it is typically free to all readers, it is another discovery tool for the paper. Let us know how this works for you so we can improve our information for authors.

Authors can supply us with DOIs for data if they wish, the data that is often requested by funders, etc. but isn't really a part of the paper.

Resources

Not in any priority order, a list that will likely grow over time of "data resources". Contact us with any suggestions.