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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.

Research data is an essential part of research and almost every publication in chemistry. The data itself can be valuable for reuse if sustainably deposited, annotated and archived. Thus, it is important to publish data following the FAIR principles, to make it findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable not only for humans but also in machine-readable form. This also improves transparency and reproducibility of research findings and fosters analytical work with scientific data to generate new insights, being only accessible with manifold and diverse datasets. Research data requires complete and informative metadata and use of open data formats to obtain interoperable data. Generic data formats like AnIML and JCAMP-DX have been used for many applications. Special formats for some analytical methods are already accepted, like mzML for mass spectrometry or nmrML and NMReDATA for NMR spectroscopy data. Other methods still lack common standards for data. Only a joint effort of chemists, instrument and software vendors, publishers and infrastructure maintainers can make sure that the analytical data will be of value in the future. In this review, we describe existing data formats in analytical chemistry and introduce guidelines for the development and use of standardized and open data formats.