A bright new future for the IUCr Newsletter

For the last 25 years, the IUCr Newsletter has been edited and produced in the United States and mainly distributed in hard-copy form. As you will be well aware, the quality of the Newsletter owes an enormous amount to the hard work and enthusiasm of its Editor, Bill Duax. Bill and his team in Buffalo have sustained the Newsletter all this time from its inception in 1993, and for this the IUCr owes them a huge debt of gratitude. However, Bill has now retired from this post, and we shall certainly miss his attention to detail as well as his many coloured outfits!

Buffalo Bill Duax, Editor of the IUCr Newsletter from 1993 to 2017.

The result of this is that for some reason the Executive Committee and the Finance Committee of the IUCr seemed to think that I would be a suitable replacement for Bill. That is going to be very difficult, I know. But with some hesitation, I admit, I agreed to do this, especially when I saw what the IUCr has planned for the future Newsletter.

The first thing to note is that the Newsletter will be online only, and the guys at Chester have been working hard to create a new fresh look. Of importance from my point of view is that we shall now be able to reach out to a much larger audience around the world, giving us a great opportunity to showcase our subject. For too long, crystallography - despite all its successful contributions to so many Nobel Prizes - has been a rather hidden subject. But the Newsletter will open the door to giving us much more publicity, not only to fellow crystallographers and scientists, but also to wider communities including the media, decision makers and professional people in general. We intend over time to make the Newsletter as attractive as possible, including dynamic content, such as movies, 3D structures, etc. In order for the IUCr to be able to afford to publish the Newsletter, the incorporation of advertising is essential. The ability to include dynamic content should appeal to our advertisers, who can use either static or dynamic images. I hope that all of this will make an attractive publication. You will note too that we have gone for a simple but clear layout, which you can use as a starting page to all other IUCr web pages. If you have any comments on the layout, we shall be pleased to hear from you.

In order to ensure as much international coverage as possible, we have appointed five Regional Editors whose remit will be to report or commission articles from their regions. They are as follows:

Africa: Delia Haynes (dhaynes@sun.ac.za)

Asia: Ted Baker (ted.baker@auckland.ac.nz) 

Europe: Serena Tarantino (serenachiara.tarantino@unipv.it)

Latin America: Abel Moreno (amoreno@iquimica.unam.mx) 

North America: Amy Sarjeant (sarjeant@ccdc.cam.ac.uk)

For this year we plan to publish two issues and thereafter four times per year as the Newsletter develops. We expect that the Newsletter will be the place to go for finding out news and developments in crystallography.

Finally, let me encourage you to submit contributions for our Newsletter to the appropriate Regional Editor, or to myself (Newsletter.Editor@iucr.org) or directly to Andrea Sharpe in the Chester office (newsletter@iucr.org).

As we were going to press, I learnt the sad news that Alexander Moodie has passed away aged 94. Alex - a pioneer in the field of electron microscopy and diffraction - was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the inaugural winner of the Ewald Prize of the IUCr. His influence on crystallography has been profound and broad, from foundation theories of dynamical scattering to new instrumental developments. An obituary will be published in a future issue of the Newsletter.