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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.

This article discusses the ways of linking physical objects to digital information relevant to chemical entities, specifically those that can be described by the use of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI). It makes recommendations on the form of the computer readable components of labels provided for chemicals and materials that are used on product/sample containers and on the associated documentation that is used when transporting these containers (either internally or during export/import). The focus is on specification of the content of the 2D Quick Response bar codes required to describe the molecular content of the containers and link to digital resources to supplement that provided on a physical label. The necessary technical and (possible) business infrastructure necessary to support the use of the InChI and InChIKey for rapid recall of relevant information is considered here and suggestions are made.

Research data management (RDM) is needed to assist experimental advances and data collection in the chemical sciences. Many funders require RDM because experiments are often paid for by taxpayers and the resulting data should be deposited sustainably for posterity. However, paper notebooks are still common in laboratories and research data is often stored in proprietary and/or dead-end file formats without experimental context. Data must mature beyond a mere supplement to a research paper. Electronic lab notebooks (ELN) and laboratory information management systems (LIMS) allow researchers to manage data better and they simplify research and publication. Thus, an agreement is needed on minimum information standards for data handling to support structured approaches to data reporting. As digitalization becomes part of curricular teaching, future generations of digital native chemists will embrace RDM and ELN as an organic part of their research.