A new TIER2 paper outlines practical ways academic publishers can strengthen enforcement of data sharing policies to improve the reproducibility of research. While journals have supported Open Science through data sharing policies for over a decade, challenges remain in ensuring compliance. The enforcement of these policies requires additional time, expertise, and resources within editorial workflows, which can be complex and varied.

To shed more light on this process, a series of publisher workshops was organised as part of TIER2’s Pilot 8, led by the University of Oxford and Taylor & Francis. The Pilot focuses on the development of an Editorial Reference Handbook (hereafter the ‘Handbook’), contributing towards a common understanding of what is required by scholarly journals and publishers to assist reproducibility and FAIRness in practice. The workshop series aimed to identify the key checks needed to enforce strengthened journal data sharing policies and to understand which editorial roles can undertake such enforcement. The intended outcome of this work was to establish the workflows and resources that can support academic journals in enforcing stronger data sharing policies in the future.

The new paper highlights that one significant finding from these workshops has been the absence of a standardised model capturing the stages and roles involved in the publishing process. Developing a publisher-agnostic workflow with clear editorial roles could facilitate collaboration across stakeholders and support innovations in research integrity and reproducibility. This workflow complements existing policy frameworks by focusing on the practicalities of enforcement rather than just implementation.

With 2025 marking ten years since data sharing policies were widely introduced in academic journals, the TIER2 project’s work comes at a key moment. Moving forward, policy enforcement through editorial checks, AI or other tools will be essential to increase the FAIRness of published data and improve reproducibility. The project’s findings offer a roadmap for publishers to achieve this goal by 2035.