Overview

Version of 3 March 2025; CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Editorial Reference Handbook (hereafter the ‘Handbook’) contributes towards a common understanding of what is required by scholarly journals and publishers to assist reproducibility and FAIRness in practice.

Rationale and aims

In May 2023, a workshop with publishers highlighted the need for a common educational and practical set of checks to help in-house editorial staff managing the manuscripts ensuring that data underpinning publications is shared in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) manner, and is reproducible in principle. To address this priority, the Handbook was co-developed by academics and professionals in publishing organisations. Details are provided in the Context, credits and reference section.

The Handbook defines the agreed checks that are fundamental to enable FAIRness and reproducibility, and usable for all digital objects (e.g. datasets, code, material) in a publication. The Handbook also places the checks onto an ideal internal manuscript submission workflow; whether or not each check is currently performed, and if so how, when and by whom these checks are done vary from journal to journal, and this can affect the outcomes.

The aims of the Handbook are to:

• operationalise the agreed checks as part of an ideal internal journal manuscript submission workflow;

• have journals integrate the concepts of the Handbook into their policies and workflows;

• assist journals with the implementation of open data sharing policies;

• ultimately make research articles more reproducible.

This work will help journals and publishers that:

• do not yet have their own internal guidance on how to enforce an open data sharing policy to introduce a workflow so that individual manuscripts can be assessed and improved;

• already have their own internal guidance to use the principles of the Handbook to validate and improve their existing methodology.

The Handbook targets in-house editorial staff managing the manuscripts, but also benefits reviewers, authors and service providers by making the fundamental checks and the requirements transparent and understandable to them.

Components of the Handbook

The Handbook includes the following 3 primary components, listed below and described in Figure 1.

• Guidance - this site

• Checklist - available as a downloadable spreadsheet (CC BY-SA 4.0). Where relevant, text in the Checklist is hyperlinked to the relevant parts of this specific section of the Guidance to provide definitions and help with the implementation of the checks.
• Flowchart - available as a downloadable visualisation (CC BY-SA 4.0). Each step in the Flowchart is also hyperlinked to individual checklist elements within the Guidance as well as its own section in the Guidance to provide definitions and help with the implementation of the checks.

The three main components of the Editorial Reference Handbook: the Checklist, the Flowchart and the Guidance.

Start using the Handbook

If you are uncertain, start by downloading the Flowchart file that provides you with at-a-glance view of the checks, who should do them and when; the file is hyperlinked to specific sections of the Guidance (this site) to provide you with definitions and help with the implementation of the checks. Then download the Checklist file template and start testing it, using the hyperlinks that point you back to this Guidance, when needed.

These two files have different strengths and focuses; which one you start with as well as the way you use and combine them with the Guidance will depend upon your familiarity with the checks, and your journal's internal systems and workflows.

The next two pages in this Guidance help you understand the Checklist and Flowchart files, and contain the definitions and help documentation that are hyperlinked from each of these files.