An important goal of peer review is to assess the strength and quality of the data supporting the conclusions of a manuscript, as well as the soundness of data interpretation. Data is the cornerstone of any manuscript, and if it cannot withstand scrutiny, the manuscript resting on it will crumble. This includes structural analyses, which underlie many manuscripts reviewed and published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (NSMB). In this editorial, we outline why we ask our authors to make their structural data — specifically, the maps and models derived from cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and tomography (cryo-ET) experiments — available to editors and reviewers prior to peer review for manuscripts that we are sending for full external review.

Our commitment to data sharing and to having data undergo rigorous peer review is not new1. Nature portfolio journals require that authors deposit new DNA sequences, RNA sequences, genome assembly data, protein sequences and proteomics data to approved repositories. For those data types, sharing unpublished datasets with reviewers can be facilitated by anonymous reviewer tokens provided by repositories, prior to public release of the datasets upon publication.

For structural data, it is our policy to mandate data deposition to relevant repositories (EMDB, wwPDB and BMRB) upon publication. Furthermore, we support deposition of associated raw data to EMPIAR and SBDGrid2. These, however, are unavailable to the public, including reviewers, prior to publication. We want to change this.

In addition to our commitment to data sharing, NSMB has taken part in pioneering the use of official wwPDB validation reports for the peer review of new structural data at Springer Nature3. It is our long-standing policy to request these reports prior to peer review for new atomic models reported in a manuscript that are obtained by X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and cryo-EM. This allows the reviewers to examine the reliability of the model and consider the validation metrics. In addition, we ask that authors use standard tables for reporting data collection and processing statistics for cryo-EM (Supplementary Table 1), NMR (Supplementary Table 2) and X-ray crystallography (Supplementary Table 3) to promote reproducibility and reuse. With the democratization and increasingly wider use of cryo-EM, we see it as necessary and the natural next step to make the final three-dimensional reconstructions and atomic models available for reviewer assessment as well.

We appreciate the anxieties associated with sharing more data prior to publication. Similarly to how other data types such as nucleic acid sequencing and proteomics are handled, authors themselves decide whether to share structural data privately and confidentially with the editors and reviewers or to release the data publicly. While we are now asking our authors to share more of the underlying data, the same core principle applies: providing the output of analyses without showing experts how the analyses were done and the data that fed them is not conducive to rigorous peer review. Expert cryo-EM reviewers have increasingly asked for access to more of the underlying structural data as a condition to review the work and our authors have been happy to supply them. We therefore think that our efforts align with the growing community consensus that robust peer review requires sharing of cryo-EM maps and models alongside the full wwPDB validation reports.

Practically, when a new study using cryo-EM is submitted to the journal, it is assigned to one of our editors, who will read the manuscript in full and provide a summary and recommendation as to whether the work is a good fit for further consideration in the journal. Upon discussion with the editorial team, the editor may decide to send the manuscript out for peer review. In that case and at this juncture, our journal now requests that the study’s authors upload the relevant files directly into the manuscript tracking system or take advantage of figshare in our submission system. Both options provide reviewers with confidential access to the data. Upon publication, our authors can delete the uploaded data to avoid redundancy with data being released by public repositories.

NSMB strives to meet the evolving needs of our communities, and we are grateful for your support and help. We thank our readers, authors and reviewers for their contributions to the journal and working with us through changing times, evolving techniques and community standards. We welcome your feedback at nsmb@us.nature.com and are always happy to discuss — please let us know if you have any comments!