The current landscape of author guidelines in chemistry through the lens of research data sharing

Abstract

Abstract As the primary method of communicating research results, journals garner an enormous impact on community behavior. Publishing the underlying research data alongside journal articles is widely considered good scientific practice. Ideally, journals and their publishers place these recommendations or requirements in their author guidelines and data policies. Several efforts are working to improve the infrastructure, processes, and uptake of research data sharing, including the NFDI4Chem consortium, working groups within the RDA, and IUPAC, including the WorldFAIR Chemistry project. In this article, we present the results of a large-scale analysis of author guidelines from several publishers and journals active in chemistry research, showing how well the publishing landscape supports different criteria and where there is room for improvement. While the requirement for deposition of X-ray diffraction data is commonplace, guidelines rarely mention machine-readable chemical structures and metadata/minimum information standards. Further evaluation criteria included recommendations on persistent identifiers, data availability statements, data deposition into repositories as well as of open analytical data formats. Our survey shows that publishers and journals are starting to include aspects of research data in their guidelines. We as authors should accept and embrace the guidelines with increasing requirements for data availability, data interoperability, and re-usability to improve chemistry research.