Momentum is building across the scholarly research ecosystem internationally to increase the sharing of data along with other research outputs, in particular to make more research data available that are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
As the primary method of communicating research results, journals and their author guidelines have a tremendous impact on community behavior. Reviewing practices related to sharing data that appear in author guidelines across a broad range of journals was the subject of a recent study conducted under NFDI4Chem, a national research data infrastructure project in Germany. NFDI4Chem is developing approaches to digitalisation of key steps in chemical research to support scientists in their efforts to collect, store, process, analyze, publish, and re-use research data.
A broad range of criteria involving data, metadata and associated articles are considered relative to their potential to impact the FAIR data principles. This review updates and expands on work developed for workshops in CINF during 2017-2019 that focused on sharing chemical structures and characterization data. Further work with scientific journal editors to enhance recommendations on data publication was initiated with an Editors4Chem workshop in 2021, and planning is underway for a second Editors4Chem workshop to be held in the fall of 2023.
In this talk we will further present on the results of the author guidelines review: To which extent is the publishing landscape supporting FAIR Data and Open Science practices? In which areas is this support lacking and what might be underlying reasons? How can authors navigate these changes?