Further developments for Acta Crystallographica Section C

With the January 2002 issue, we continue to see improvements in the handling and processing of submissions to Acta Crystallographica Section C; the aim is to make submission to Section C as easy as possible and to reduce publication times considerably.

Five main areas have been addressed: submission, Co-editor handling of manuscripts, handling of proofs, posting of accepted papers to the web, and a change in the pagination of the monthly issues.

Submission to Section C is now via the web at //journals.iucr.org/services/submit.html . Full details are available in the 2002 Notes for Authors which are included in this issue.

Co-editor handling of manuscripts will be essentially the same as at present. The Chester office sends Co-editors all review material electronically and after the refereeing process and any required author revision is complete, the Co-editors ensure that appropriate corrections are made to the final CIF which they then return to the Chester office for publication.

Significant changes have been made to the appearance of author proofs; these now contain the artwork within the body of the paper so that the proofs are now very much closer to the actual final appearance of the published paper. When the proofs are ready, the submitting author and the Section Editor are informed simultaneously by e-mail that proofs are available and should be downloaded from the Section C web site. The Section Editor reviews all proofs and reserves the right to make minor changes for consistency and conformity to Section C standards. In the very unlikely event that substantive changes are thought to be required, the Chester office will be informed and Chester staff will contact authors by e-mail as soon as possible. When the Section Editor and author changes to the proofs are agreed upon, these are incorporated into the proofs which then go into the publication stream.

Papers will be posted on the web on a regular basis, as is now done for Section E. These papers will receive an online publication date when they appear on the web site. At the end of a month, the online papers will be collected and published as the next month's issue of Section C. These changes coupled with a faster turn around at the typesetters should reduce publication times considerably.

Papers will appear in three sections (inorganic, metal–organic and organic) as before, but the sections will now have individual numberings, i.e. i1, i2, i3…; m1, m2, m3…; and o1, o2, o3…, respectively. This pagination change will allow papers to be placed in the appropriate sections as they become available, where before there was no possibility of including a paper in an early part of an issue once the pages had been made up.

The 2002 Notes for Authors are available at //journals.iucr.org/c/services/authorservices.html . In addition to the changes mentioned above, authors are now reminded that they have one month to respond with revisions to papers. The attention of authors is also drawn to §5.2 where they are alerted to changes in the requirements for nomenclature for crystal structures containing chiral molecules and that absolute configuration should be indicated using the CIF data item _chemical_absolute_configuration.

It is a pleasure to welcome Dr Jean-Claude Daran (UPR–CNRS, France) and Dr Karl Törnroos (University of Bergen, Norway) as new members of the Section C editorial board. I must also acknowledge and warmly thank Dr P. D. Boyle (North Carolina State University, USA), Professor B. Gallois (University of Bordeaux, France), Professor Y. Ohashi (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and Professor A. Oskarsson (Lund University, Sweden), who are retiring from the Section C editorial board, for their services to Section C and to the crystallographic community.