A lost opportunity for science: journals promote data sharing in metabolomics but do not enforce it

Introduction Data sharing is being increasingly required by journals and has been heralded as a solution to the 'replication crisis'. Objectives (i) Review data sharing policies of journals publishing the most metabolomics papers associated with open data and (ii) compare these journals' policies to those that publish the most metabolomics papers. Methods A PubMed search was used to identify metabolomics papers. Metabolomics data repositories were manually searched for linked publications. Results Journals that support data sharing are not necessarily those with the most papers associated to open metabolomics data. Conclusion Further efforts are required to improve data sharing in metabolomics.