Digital Discovery

Article types

Communications

Our Communication format is ideally suited to short studies - which can be preliminary in nature - that are of such importance that they require accelerated publication.

Communications must contain original and highly significant work whose interest to the Digital Discovery readership and high novelty warrants rapid publication. Authors should supply with their submission a justification of why the work merits urgent publication as a Communication. Referees will be asked to judge the work on these grounds.

Communications are given high visibility within the journal as they are published at the front of an issue. Communications will not normally exceed the length of four printed journal pages.

Full papers

Full papers must represent a significant development in the particular field and are judged according to originality, quality of scientific content and contribution to existing knowledge. Authors are encouraged to emphasise the importance and potential impact of the research presented. Although there is no page limit for Full papers, the appropriateness of length to content will be taken into consideration.

Papers describing hardware should focus on the development of open-source scientific hardware advancing the digitalization of chemistry, materials science, or biotechnology. The application of hardware to accelerated discovery should be clearly demonstrated in the manuscript. To enable reuse, a clear license should be provided for the materials and we have a strong preference for open-source hardware licenses, such as the CERN Open Hardware License.

More information about requirements and guidelines for writing a hardware paper can be found in the recently published Editorial.

Reviews & Perspectives

Reviews and Perspectives must be high-quality, authoritative, state-of-the-art accounts of the selected research field. They should be timely and add to the existing literature, rather than duplicate existing articles, and should be of general interest to the journal's wide readership.

All Reviews and Perspectives undergo rigorous peer review, in the same way as regular research papers.

All review content should consist of original text and interpretation, avoiding any direct reproduction. If a significant amount of other people's material is to be used, either textual or image-based, permission must be sought by the author in accordance with copyright law and must be made clear in the manuscript.

Reviews report a detailed, balanced and authoritative current account of the existing state of knowledge on a particular facet of within the field. Reviews may be shorter summaries highlighting important recent developments, or more detailed, balanced accounts, of the selected research field. Simple literature surveys will not be accepted for publication. Reviews should not contain unpublished original research. 

Perspectives present an authoritative state-of-the-art account of a research field. A Perspective may take the form of a personal account of research or a critical analysis of a topic of current interest. In either form, some new unpublished research may be included.

Opinions

Opinions are short, personal viewpoints on a topic of current interest to the community. They can be speculative in nature, and provided that they are not defamatory to the work of others, can be controversial and stimulate counter-opinion. They should contain rigorous, evidence-backed scientific justification, and bring significant and valuable insights to the field.
Opinions are typically three to four pages in length and are published by invitation of the Digital Discovery Editorial Board or Editorial Office. Authors interested in submitting an opinion should contact the Editorial Office at DigitalDiscovery-rsc@rsc.org. Opinions undergo a rigorous and full peer review procedure, in the same way as Full Papers.

Comments

Comments and Replies are a medium for the discussion and exchange of scientific opinions between authors and readers concerning material published in Digital Discovery.

For publication, a Comment should present an alternative analysis of and/or new insight into the previously published material. Any Reply should further the discussion presented in the original article and the Comment. Comments and Replies that contain any form of personal attack are not suitable for publication.

Comments that are acceptable for publication will be forwarded to the authors of the work being discussed, and these authors will be given the opportunity to submit a Reply. The Comment and Reply will both be subject to rigorous peer review in consultation with the journal’s Editorial Board where appropriate. The Comment and Reply will be published together.

Tutorial reviews

Tutorial reviews should provide an introduction and overview of an important topic of relevance to the journal readership. The topic should provide a good introduction to the development of a subject, its current state and indications of future directions the field is expected to take. These reviews can describe the use of modern software tools (such as AI systems and/or hardware control systems) or open hardware designs for chemical synthesis and/or characterization. Tutorial reviews can be aimed at audiences ranging from graduate students to faculty. Tutorial reviews should not contain unpublished original research.

We at the Royal Society of Chemistry believe that where possible, all data associated with the research in a manuscript should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), enabling other researchers to replicate and build on that research. Authors are expected to submit both their code and data supporting their manuscript to community-recognized data repositories or a general repository if no community resource is available. Referees have to be able to access code and data during the peer-review process, and public release should be coordinated with the publication of the manuscript.  

Papers describing hardware should be accompanied by detailed supporting information, including a comprehensive bill of materials and a construction guide. All design files and software code should be hosted in a public, persistent repository, ensuring easy access and longevity of the resources. In addition to any finished products, authors should provide relevant files in editable format.

All research articles submitted to Digital Discovery must be accompanied by a data availability statement (DAS) which provides information about where data, software and code supporting the results reported in a published article can be found (more information can be found in the ‘Data availability statement’ section below).

If authors are unable to publicly share their code and data due to employer policies or previous arrangements they still need to release as much data and tools as possible (datasets, analysis scripts, etc.) and detail the reasons for the omission of other resources in the data availability statement. The reasons for restrictions on data and code sharing will be assessed by the editor at submission who reserves the right to reject the manuscript if these conditions are excessively prohibitive.

Under any circumstances, all supporting data and code must be made available to editors and peer reviewers at the time of submission for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript.

Data availability statements

In order to maintain high standards of transparency, research reproducibility, and to promote the reuse of new findings a data availability statement (DAS) is required to be submitted alongside all articles. The DAS should include, where applicable, links to code and datasets which have been analysed or generated during the study and shared in an external data repository. This section should list the database, accession number, DOI, URL or any other relevant details. In case of code deposition, the exact version and date of access to a repository have to be described for future reproducibility. If deposited in a public repository associated codes and datasets are required to be formally cited in the reference section of an article.

A DAS can provide information about the data presented in an article (e.g. in Figures or Tables) and provide a reason if code or data is not available to access. If supporting data or code has been included in the article’s electronic supplementary information (ESI), this should also be stated here.

A DAS is required to be submitted alongside all manuscripts as an accompanying file. It will be published as part of the articles accepted for publication and can be found by readers following the Conclusions section of the paper.

Examples of data availability statements which can be used are shown below:

1. The code for [description] can be found at [URL] with [DOI – if available]. The version of the code employed for this study is version XXXX.
2. Data and processing scripts for this paper, including [description of data types] are available at [name of repository] at [URL – format https://doi.org/DOI].
3. This study was carried out using publicly available data from [name of repository] at [URL] with [accession number].
4. Alternatively: The code, analysis scripts, and datasets supporting this article have been uploaded as part of the supplementary material.
5. The data analysis scripts of this paper are available in the interactive notebook X [Example, Google Collab].
6. As this is a [Review/Perspective article], no primary research results, data, software or code have been included.

The following statement is not acceptable: “Data are available upon request from the authors".

Choosing a repository

The Royal Society of Chemistry supports the TRUST principles for digital repositories - Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology - for repository selection and strongly encourages the use of repositories offering persistent identifiers, such as DOIs, for deposited datasets. These help make robust connections between datasets and papers, e.g. via the inclusion of a Data Availability Statement.

The following websites may help for searching and selecting subject-specific repositories.

• re3data
• FAIRsharing

Software/code can be deposited in the repositories listed below:

• GitHub Please also consider archiving code in combination with a repository that can issue a DOI. For example https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
• Code Ocean

General repositories

Where subject-specific or institutional/funder repositories are not available, authors may wish to choose a general repository, such as:

Dryad Digital Repository - Fees apply

figshare - Fees apply    

Harvard Dataverse - Contact repository for datasets over 1 TB     

Open Science Framework - Free of charge          

Science Data Bank - Free of charge      

Zenodo - Donations towards sustainability encouraged