Structure Reports Online: a continuing growth and success story

The year 2003 has seen another period of growth for Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online. The numbers of papers published in each category were: inorganic 59; metal-organic 444; organic 784; errata 2 – a total of 1299 papers in 3419 pages. As in previous years, a large proportion of the papers has been submitted by scientists in the People's Republic of China, India and Southeast Asian countries. The turnround continues to be less than one month from receipt to publication, with some papers reaching publication within three days.

Some additions and modifications have been made to the editorial procedures and to Notes for Authors for 2004. The Notes can be found under `Author services' at https://journals.iucr.org/e/journalhomepage.html. In particular, we have made some changes to the handling of manuscripts that generate serious checkCIF alerts, in order to reduce the editorial time lost in dealing with these problems, which should be resolved by authors before submission. Authors are reminded that the use of the checkCIF facility is required prior to submission, and all level-A alerts must be dealt with by appropriate corrective action or by completion of a validation report form (VRF) in the submitted CIF.

There are also developments in the facilities available to help authors in preparation of their manuscripts. A fully functional version of enCIFer is now provided by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, and can be downloaded from the CCDC web site (https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/products/encifer/index.html). This program provides a number of features for checking and editing a CIF and is particularly valuable in testing for syntax errors, incorrect CIF data names, unmatched sub- and superscript codes, and for editing CIF data loops. The IUCr has also constructed software for interconverting between a CIF and an RTF (Rich Text Format, compatible with Microsoft Word) version of a manuscript, so that text sections of a paper can be more easily written in a familiar MS-Word environment and then incoporated automatically in the CIF for submission. A test version of this template, printCIF for Word, is available from https://journals.iucr.org/e/services/cifinfo.html, and authors are encouraged to make use of it and provide feedback for its further development and improvement.

During the year one Co-editor retired, Professor Angiola Chiesi-Villa (University of Parma), following her appointment as Dean of her Faculty. We thank her for her contribution during the past two years. To cope with the increasing number of papers submitted to the journal we have appointed a number of new Co-editors. We welcome Dr William Harrison (University of Aberdeen, Scotland), Dr Peter Healy (Griffith University, Australia), Dr Seik Weng Ng (University of Malaya, Malaysia), Dr Georgina Rosair (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland), Dr Matthias Weil (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) and Dr Claire Wilson (University of Nottingham, England). This brings to 22 the number of Co-editors and we thank them all for their hard work during 2003. Equally we are all indebted to the editorial team in Chester for their unstinting help and enthusiasm.