A workshop with representatives of major publishers indicated that strengthening their journals’ data policies and training their in-house editorial staff were among the key priorities to improve the availability of data underpinning publications, and foster good practices for sharing data, ultimately advancing open research.  

Fast forward two years, the Editorial Reference Handbook informs and assists journals to operationalise a set of checks necessary to make the data underlying published research findings more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) to underpin, although not guaranteeing, reproducibility. The Handbook complements existing work (e.g., to improve data policy and analyse the impact on journals of introducing Data Availability Statements) and fills a gap, because no common guidance existed on the practical implementation of these checks across a complex publishing workflow and the variety of individuals and teams involved. The Handbook targets in-house staff managing the manuscripts primarily, but it will also benefit reviewers, authors and even those providing services to publishers by making the fundamental checks and requirements transparent and understandable.

The Editorial Reference Handbook includes three interlinked components: a checklist of 12 elements, a flowchart that outlines the ideal internal manuscript submission workflow (who should perform the checks and when), and a guidance to help users to implement the checks effectively, with definitions and tips. At the core of putting FAIR in practice are the use of appropriate standards (i.e., terminologies, models, formats, minimal information requirements, and identifier schema) and databases (repositories and knowledge bases). There are many checks that editorial staff should perform, including if and where data (incl. dataset, code, workflow) has been deposited, and if the appropriate community standards have been used by the researchers/authors. To guide the editorial staff in operationalising these types of checks, the checklists and guidance components are linked to FAIRsharing, a curated, informative and educational service on standards, inter-related to databases and data policies, across all disciplines.

Participating publishers 

As well as being a practical product, the Handbook is also a socio-technical pilot to improve the culture by facilitating the practice, ensuring accessible, verifiable research findings, and leading by example, influencing and informing other publishers and journals. Co-created by over 20 journals from academic and commercial scholarly publishers, the use of the Handbook is currently being piloted. Set to end this summer, the ongoing intervention aims to document what may need to change or improve to successfully implement these checks in terms of in-house capability (e.g., needing more knowledge about how to run them), opportunity (e.g., needing support to apply them), and motivation (e.g., needing to prioritise them). In parallel, the data policies of all participating journals will be ‘audited’ for completeness and clarity, via FAIRsharing, and improved as needed. Some of the journals that have participated in the co-creation will act as the positive control group in the intervention; they already have stringent data policies and their own internal guidance, and will use the principles of the Handbook to validate and improve their existing methodology. Over the coming months, data from the intervention will be collected and documented along with the experience of publishers and journals. The information will form an article about the co-creation and the intervention phases, to the benefit of other journals and publishing organisations, as well as authors, reviewers and other stakeholders, such as funders who are key agents of change in fostering a culture of responsible data practices.

A two-page overview of the Handbook is available here. For more information, reach out to the Handbook co-leads Allyson Lister and Susanna-Assunta Sansone (University of Oxford), Rebecca Taylor-Grant and Matt Cannon (Taylor & Francis).