June 2011

Supplemental Material Instructions

The APS journals provide a platform for Supplemental Material (SM) deposited as electronic files. SM is useful information that is not essential to understanding an article's main results. Being electronic, it can also include material that cannot at this time be integrated into the printed journal (e.g., movies). Please note that SM cannot be used to avoid a length limit, since any article must be convincing without its SM. There is no charge associated with SM.

How to deposit

1. Web Upload (preferred): Electronic files should be uploaded via the Web as part of a manuscript submission via our submission server [1]. During the web upload process a README.TXT file will be automatically created from the information you provide. (The README.TXT file details important aspects of your deposit for the end user such as file type, installation instructions, minimum requirements, etc.)
2. Email: SM files may be submitted via email.

Multiple files should be submitted as several messages, as uuencoded pieces included in one message, or as MIME attachments. The subject line should read “Supplemental Material Submission,” and the message should give the title, first author, journal of the associated main article, and the complete list of filenames. We support UNIX compress, UNIX tar, zip, gzip.

Citation in Article

Authors should ensure that the journal article contains a reference in the reference list as follows:

See Supplemental Material at [URL will be inserted by publisher] for [give brief description of material].

Storage/Retrieval

All files related to an article will be stored as a single deposit and will be assigned an SM URL. This will appear in the article's reference list, which will link to the supplemental file(s).

File Formats

These file formats [11] are acceptable for APS journals.