Commission on Journals satellite meeting
The Journals Commission meeting, which was attended by more than half of the Co-editors of the IUCr journals, provided an excellent opportunity to demonstrate some of the recent and forthcoming technical innovations affecting editorial handling of articles, and also the ways in which authors can make contributions.
Co-editors were shown the enhancements to the online submission and review system which will be implemented in the near future. Authors will have the opportunity to upload source files (individual figures, data files etc.) at the start of the submission process. This will make the technical editing process more efficient, and will also allow an easier resolution of problems with the files. It also offers the prospect of better handling of articles in formats that can use bibliographic managers or other authoring support systems.
Improved manuscript handling provision will allow Co-editors to invite reviewers from within the system, and reviewers may submit their reports online. Co-editors may also use the system to actively manage the acceptance, rejection or withdrawal of submissions. Many of the Co-editors at the meeting expressed their satisfaction at these new developments, and a great deal of valuable feedback was provided to suggest further improvements, based on the experiences (good and bad!) that Co-editors had had with other journals' and publishers' systems. Several of the new features were already familiar to Co-editors of the structural journals Acta Cryst. C and E, but the new system would allow all the journals to operate in te same way while - importantly - allowing each journal great flexibility in the fine detail of providing directions or advice to authors and reviewers.
Also presented were two innovations for authors that will be publicly demonstrated at the IUCr stand throughout the Congress. An enhanced figure toolkit, available to all authors, allows the creation of three-dimensional visualizations of structures in a browser applet. Authors may also - without any knowledge of the visualizer application language or of web page design - add buttons and checkbox selections to the enhanced figure allowing a reader to select different views of the structure. A major difference between this approach and other journals' provision of interactive applications is that the enhanced figures would not be considered as supplementary documents. Instead, they are an integral part of the article, subject to the same peer review as all other content. Handling of enhanced figures within the submission/review system is entirely automated, and it is hoped that they will become an important and distinctive feature of IUCr journals.
The second author tool is a set of web forms allowing the input of important data items required in a macromolecular structure or crystallization report. The tool can import an author's mmCIF (or a deposited structure from the PDB) and will automatically extract any of the required items that are present. Missing data items are then inserted by hand. The web pages are designed to lead the author clearly through the data requirements, which can otherwise seem very complex, especially if one is dealing with multiple crystals or diffraction data sets. Every entry field is extensively annotated with online help, and predictive text features will help authors to enter chemical names and other information consistently. The result is a set of one or more tables, formatted to the requirements of the journal, that can be pasted directly into an article submission. The author may also export all the input information in mmCIF format, allowing interchange with other software or data handling systems.
Co-editors were also reminded of the new hyperglossary linking feature that annotates the online journal articles with links to definitions of technical terms in the Online Dictionary of Crystallography and other reference compilations.
