1st Editors4Chem Workshop: Chemistry Journals Author Guidelines Viewed from the Perspective of Research Data Publishing

NFDI4Chem together with Leah McEwen (Cornell University, Ithaca) and Vincent Scalfani (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa) from IUPAC organised the 1st Editors4Chem workshop, which was held on the 3rd November 2021.

This workshop is part of the holistic strategy in NFDI4Chem to ramp up the adoption of FAIR data in chemistry by interfacing with the scholarly publication processes. The importance of this topic to the publishers is demonstrated by the fact that no less than 18 editors (including many Editors-in-Chief!) representing at least 25 chemistry journals across five publishers signed up for this three hour workshop. 

This Zenodo record contains the slides of the presentation given by Tillmann G. Fischer (NFDI4Chem, IPB Halle), who presented the evaluation of roughly 50 author guidelines in a Team with Claudia Blankenburg (NFDI4Chem, IPB Halle) and Nicole Parks (NFDI4Chem, RWTH Aachen) und supervision of Steffen Neumann (NFDI4Chem, IPB Halle). Some findings were to be expected, like the broad recommendation to use DOIs to refer to publications and datasets. But also unexpected findings were encountered. Roughly 80% of the checked author guidelines do not point authors on the concept of field-specific research data repositories. Additionally, ~50% do not mention anything on a Data Availability Statement. Only one journal explicitly recommended the SMILES notation to describe chemical structures in a machine-readable way, even in the straightforward case of organic compounds and biochemistry. Recommendations on Minimum Information standards or open analytical data formats were only rarely encountered.