A request to use text files instead of pdfs to share supplementary material.

avoid_pdf_tables

Dear Doctor ____, 

I wanted to thank you for your published paper on _____. It provides a significant contribution to the field of ______, and I hope you will continue publishing similar work in the future. I have been trying to build on your work, integrating your results with my own research. Unfortunately, this has proved challenging because the supplementary tables were published in a .pdf format, which requires manual copying and pasting, it doesn't preserve the original format, and is prone to character encoding errors. 

In future publications, you could easily avoid these issues by making the supplementary tables available in files of comma-separated values (.csv), or plain-text format. Figshare is a popular online resource used by many authors to publish this type of data in a way that is easily citeable. You can read more about it here: http://figshare.com/features. Feel free to share it with your colleagues. 

Thank you for making scientific research more accessible. 

Best,
____