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IUCr Journals Development

The IUCr is embarking upon a project to extend and expand the scope of its Journals to meet the needs and serve the interests of the crystallographic and wider scientific community that utilize structural information for addressing their scientific questions. The Editor-in-chief, Samar Hasnain, in consultation with appropriate committees and commissions of the IUCr as well as the wider community, has developed a plan to make the IUCr's journals the natural home for many of the high-quality scientific publications that are currently published in NSMB, Structure, PNAS, JACS, Angewandte Chem., Chem. Commun. etc., where structural data underpin these publications.

Chemists, biologists, physicists and material scientists will be actively encouraged to report the best of their crystallographic studies in the IUCr's journals. Significant changes will be implemented in Journal organization and management to coincide with the celebration of the International Year of Crystallography.

Today's scientific advances require multidisciplinary research and new journals covering a wide range of technologies and applications. Because crystallographic studies are critical to understanding the structural basis for chemistry, physics, biology and materials science, the IUCr will inaugurate a new open­access mega journal as part of the celebration of the IYCr. The new Journal will be simply called 'IUCr Journal' (IUCrJ). IUCrJ will be fully open access, striving to reach high impact and influence appropriate for the best of our science. Our aim is to capture a fair share of high-profile papers on all aspects of sciences and technologies supported by IUCr via its commissions, including emerging fields where diffraction plays a role. Much of the exciting crystallographic results that are published in other journals appeared first in presentations at IUCr congresses, AsCA, ECM and ACA meetings. The goal for 2014 will be to publish 100 articles in IUCrJ covering as many aspects of crystallographic development and application as possible. As much as half of these will be solicited from the presentations of cutting edge research at ECM, AsCA and ACA meetings. A Management Board has been appointed that will be responsible for (a) increasing the influence of IUCr journals among the wider scientific communities (b) serving the interests of all of its Commissions, (c) broadening the scope of the journals so that high-quality science papers that use crystallography are attracted to the journals, and (d) improving the visibility of IUCr journals at non-crystallographic conferences.

A Journal Development and Promotions Officer will be appointed in early 2013 with a mandate to (a) reach out to wider science community, (b) encourage closer integration of the journals with the Commissions, (c) develop social media marketing, (d) boost article citations by writing press releases highlighting the most significant papers, (e) prepare market research reports including citation and usage trend analysis, (f) identify subject trends and new journal opportunities, (g) identify target authors and encourage them to submit to the journals, and (h) exploit opportunities arising from IYCr2014. The Development and Promotions Officer will work closely with the Editorial staff.

Samar Hasnain
28 January 2013