IUCr 1996 Report - Acta Crystallographica Section C

The Section C Editorial Board has been successful with all of its key objectives for the last triennium. It has increased its authorship from a low of 852 papers in 1994 to 1289 papers (1511 structures and 3262 pages) in 1996. It completed the transition to fully electronic submissions in May of 1996. During this period, the CIF approach has become the industry standard for exchanging, archiving and handling data in the structural sciences, and is widely used by other journals and databases.

An important part of the CIF submission process to Acta is the archiving of these files at the Chester Office and their availability to the crystallographic community over the Internet. Currently there are over 5000 Section C CIFs in this archive and it is increasing at a rate of over 100 CIFs per month. This is an extremely valuable scientific resource for the community and the IUCr in the future.

The size of the Section C issues grew quickly in 1996 for three main reasons. First, its initiative to provide for electronic submissions (and the associated services for checking and printing the manuscripts) has been very popular and is, in fact, being adopted by other journals. Second, there is an accelerating number of structures determined due to better instrumentation and faster computers. Third, the reputation of Section C in the structural science community as a provider of concise and well checked structural information is important for many authors.

It was clear, however, that, in the absence of a commensurate growth in journal income (either from increased or higher subscriptions), this growth could not be sustained. This is especially true at a time of some uncertainty for the scientific journal industry when subscriptions are decreasing and publishing costs are soaring. These factors are important in determining the viability of a journal independently of its scientific reputation. Submission and delivery modes are also changing with a shift from the traditional print-on-paper approaches to electronic services and presentation modes. Section C is well placed to compete both scientifically and financially in the changing scientific publication market as it is already a leader in using and determining the new publication technologies.

These considerations were foremost in the discussions of the Section C Editorial Board at the Seattle Congress in August. Some major policy changes were decided on at these meetings and these have, in the main, been encompassed in the 1997 Notes for Authors. In summary these include:

The provision for two separate modes of `full' and `CIF-access' papers. Authors must nominate the mode on submission.

The automation of the preliminary data checking of CIFs and stricter requirements for `initial entry' into the review process.

The submitted CIFs satisfying the validation requirements will be assigned a Data Validation Number (DVN) which is embedded in the file. The DVN will be used as the publication reference code or as an archival access code.

The format of printed papers will be reduced by printing only coordinate tables which contain high symmetry sites, by condensing slightly the Experimental data section, by enforcing the requirement that printed geometry details contain only unique and novel values, and by allowing only one printed diagram per structure.

S. R. Hall, Editor

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