Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online

The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) and Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) have worked jointly to develop a proposal for an electronic-only structural journal.

The new journal has been approved by the IUCr Executive Committee and will commence publication in January 2001, with the title Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online.

Section E will provide for rapid publication of inorganic, metal-organic and organic crystal structures. It will be available through the IUCr's Crystallography Journals Online initiative (see http://journals.iucr.org/).

The new journal will be wholly electronic with respect to submission, validation, refereeing and publication.

Objectives of the journal

The main objectives of the journal are to encourage the publication and deposition of crystal structures, and to provide academic recognition for scientists who generate such data.

Section E aims to have clearly defined standards of scientific quality that will be considered `reasonable' by most contributors; it will also have clearly defined minimum requirements for information content, including chemical information and text content.

It is intended that Section E should be simple for contributors to use, low-cost, a refereed primary source, citable and be covered by major secondary (abstracting) publications.

Format and content of Section E

To allow automation, Section E contributions will report crystal structure studies of single compounds only.

Each e-report will be required to include refereeable scientific content and (limited) citations of related work, and will consist of:

• Title
• Author details
• Abstract
• Comment (optional)
• Experimental
• Figures (optional)
• References

It is envisaged that atomic coordinates will not be included in the e-report, but will be accessible from a CIF archive. Structure factors in CIF format will also be made available from the archive.

For molecular species, a 2D chemical diagram will be included.

Powder as well as single-crystal studies will be included in the journal.

Individual articles will be published as soon as they are ready for publication. At the end of each month, articles published in that month will be collected together into formal journal issues.

The journal will provide:

• Journal home page, reader and author services, and related pages
• Tables of Contents
• e-reports in HTML and PDF formats
• Access to the CIF, structure factors, and other supplementary data
• Viewing of the 2D diagram
• Generation and manipulation of a variety of 3D diagrams, and presentation of multimedia supplements supplied by authors
• Key precision indicators for each e-report
• Links to structural databases
• Links to bibliographic databases

Key precision indicators will be included to allow readers of the journal to make a quick assessment of any structure.

Authors will be supplied with electronic reprints.

Relationship of Section E to Section C

Acta Crystallographica Section E and Acta Crystallographica Section C will together provide a full range of publication options for the rapid publication of inorganic, metal-organic and organic crystal structures

Section E aims to publish interesting and difficult structures that fall outside the criteria for formal printed publication in Section C with respect to:

• Technical quality of the crystal structure determination, which may not reach the standards demanded by Section C.
• Need for significant scientific comment on the structure, which would normally be less than for Section C, and often be satisfied by the Abstract.

The current `electronic papers' section of Section C (CIF-Access Papers) will form part of Section E from January 2001.

Handling of submissions and preparation of Section E

• All handling will be electronic, from submission, through validation to publication.
• Each e-report will contain one structure only.
• CIF will be the only permitted format.
• The CCDC will provide an interactive CIF-editing program, through which CIFs which are output by data collection and refinement software can be checked and supplemented to generate Section E submissions. A 2D chemical diagram will be included for molecular species.
• Investigations are to be undertaken on how to include text sections via a number of well known word-processing packages, rather than use the CIF typesetting rules.
• Contributors will be required to use the IUCr's CHECKCIF facilities.
• Submissions will be web-based.
• Submissions will be copied to the CCDC, who will perform an `originality' check of the structure and other such checks which enable this to be done.
• The review process will be via a secure web site.

Editorial Board

An Editorial Board is currently being set up under the guidance of the Editor-in-Chief of Acta Crystallographica (John Helliwell), and Bill Clegg and David Watson (Editors).

Subscriptions

• Contributors to Section E will be offered a special low-cost subscription price of USD 35.
• Subscribers to Section C will receive free access to Section E.
• The personal subscription rate will be USD 75 and the institutional rate will be USD 250.
• The sponsorship of the journal by advertisers will be encouraged.

An order form is also available as a PDF file.