Spotlight on materials research

IUCr Journals and the International Year of Crystallography

The year 2014 has been declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr2014) to celebrate 100 years of success following the first Nobel prize related to crystallography, awarded in 1914 to Max von Laue. The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), working with UNESCO, is proud to be the custodian of the IYCr2014 and has set up plans for major initiatives during the year. You can find out more about these activities by clicking here.

In celebration of IYCr2014 we are making a number of our papers from our materials journals free to download for a limited period of time. Visit regularly during the month of October to see what is new.

For IYCr2014, the journals have published a number of special issues and collections of articles. For more information on special issues navigate through the special issues list in the sidebar on the right of this page.

The year also coincides with the launch of a fully open-access journal with the objective of attracting high-quality science papers of broad scientific significance from across all the scientific communities that use results obtained from diffraction methods. The journal is simply called IUCrJ. The journal has published five issues so far this year and will publish one further issue in 2014.

We strive for high quality and we encourage material scientists, biologists, chemists and physicists to report the best of their structural studies in IUCrJ. Major scientific advances require multidisciplinary research and very often these breakthrough papers report results covering a wide range of methods and technologies.

A selection of recent materials research articles in IUCr journals that are currently free to download is given below (visit us regularly to see what is new).