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Physical samples and their associated (meta)data underpin scientific discoveries across disciplines, and can enable new science when appropriately archived. However, there are significant gaps in community practices and infrastructure that currently prevent accurate provenance tracking, reproducibility, and attribution. For the vast majority of samples, descriptive metadata is often sparse, inaccessible, or absent. Samples and associated (meta)data may also be scattered across numerous physical collections, data repositories, laboratories, data files, and papers with no clear linkages or provenance tracking as new information is generated over time. The Physical Samples Curation Cluster has therefore developed ‘A Scientific Author Guide for Publishing Open Research Using Physical Samples.’ This involved synthesizing existing practices, community feedback, and assessing real-world examples to identify community and infrastructure needs. We identified areas of work needed to enable authors to efficiently reference samples and related data, link related samples and data, and track their use. Our goal is to help improve the discoverability, interoperability, use of physical samples and associated (meta)data into the future. 

Abstract Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors:www.dpjedi.org) has collated several resources on embedding open science in journal editing (www.dpjedi.org/resources). However, it can be overwhelming as an editor new to open science practices to know where to start. For this reason, we created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices within their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy and practice. This manuscript introduces and summarizes the guide (full guide:https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hstcx).