Acta Crystallographica Section F: developments in the first year

At the start of 2005, Acta Crystallographica Section F: Structural Biology and Crystallization Communications was launched by the International Union of Crystallography. At that time we looked forward to the development and growth of this purely electronic journal, and to a celebration of its first year of publication. The journal is now more than a year old, and there is indeed much to celebrate.

We are happy to report that in January we were notified that the journal had been approved for inclusion in Medline. In gaining this listing, we were advised at various points along the way by David Eisenberg, and also received help from Stephen Burley, Hans Deisenhofer and Brian Matthews, who wrote letters of support for our application. We thank David, Stephen, Hans and Brian for their time and help in making the application successful. In the last month, the entire first volume has been sent to the National Library of Medicine so that Acta Cryst. F will be accessible via PubMed from the first issue on and, confirming our own experiences, we have begun to hear from interested authors and others that their attempts at PubMed access have been successful.

In addition to indexing by Medline, the journal has been accredited by the Institute for Scientific Information, leading to inclusion of articles in the Science Citation Index. The journal is also covered by other major databases such as Chemical Abstracts, and, as part of Crystallography Journals Online, benefits from indexing by search engines such as Google and Scirus.

One of the primary reasons for launching the journal was to allow authors in fields such as structural genomics and macromolecular crystallization to benefit from the fast turnaround of electronic-only publication. In its first year, the journal has worked very hard to ensure rapid publication; the average publication time from submission to publication including peer review was just 2.2 months. The journal has also been working during the year on a streamlined route from database deposition to publication. We expect to report more on this initiative in a separate Editorial later this year.

Finally, we are pleased to report that the journal has proved to be very popular with authors. In its first year, 12 issues were published and included over 300 articles and 1100 pages.

We are proud of the success of Acta Crystallographica Section F in its first year of publication. It is due in no small measure to the dedication and hard work of the editorial staff in Chester, Louise Jones, Simon Glynn, Brian McMahon and Peter Strickland, and of our excellent team of Co-editors, to whom we are very grateful. To cope with the high flow of articles, we have had to expand the Editorial Board and we now also welcome Terese Bergfors (Uppsala University), JuanMa García-Ruiz (University of Granada) and Bart Hazes (University of Alberta) as new members.