Further developments for Acta Crystallographica Section C

Meetings of the Section C Editorial Board prior to the Geneva General Assembly of the IUCr concentrated on how to streamline the submission processes for Sections C and E. To this end, there has been a thorough revision of the checkcif process available at //journals.iucr.org/c/services/authorservices.html , which authors are required to use prior to submission. Links to various web pages explaining the meanings of any `alerts' detected in the checkcif run are now included in the material returned electronically to the submitting author. As in the past, authors are asked to respond to and justify or account for class `A' alerts and deal with as many of the other `alerts' as possible before actual submission to the journal. The use of a dedicated computer system to deal with checkcif requests has improved response time so that it now normally only takes a few seconds to get a full checkcif response from any submission. The 2003 Notes for Authors are printed in this issue and are also available at //journals.iucr.org/c/services/authorservices.html .

Section C publication times have continued to improve and the gap between submission and publication is now less than three months, with some papers appearing online within a month of receipt. Proofed papers are posted on the web on a regular basis, at which time they receive an online publication date. As before, at the end of each month, the online papers are collected and published as the next month's issue of Section C. Diagrams in the printed version of Section C will continue to be in black and white, but diagrams submitted in colour will normally appear in colour in both the online journal and the PDF reprints downloaded via the web. Authors will continue to be sent details of how to download free electronic reprints of their articles.

Authors who use SHELXL-generated CIFs for submission of their structural data are encouraged to read carefully the 2003 Acta Crystallographica Section E editorial entitled `Some guidelines for publishing SHELXL-generated CIF results in Acta Crystallog­ra­phica' by Professor W. Clegg, one of the Section Editors of Section E.

It is a pleasure to thank the Co-editors, anonymous referees and the dedicated Chester staff for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of Section C. I also welcome J. Barbier (McMaster University, Canada), L. R. Falvello (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain), G. J. Gainsford (Industrial Research Limited, New Zealand), J. A. Krause Bauer (University of Cincinnati, USA), P. J. Squattrito (Central Michigan University, USA) and M. Tremayne (University of Birmingham, England) as new members of the Section C Editorial Board. I must also acknowledge and warmly thank C. P. Brock (University of Kentucky, USA), I. D. Brown (McMaster University, Canada) and M. Vijayan (Indian Institute of Science, India), who have now retired from the Section C Editorial Board, for their services to Section C and to the crystallographic community.