CIF news

It is nearly five years since Acta Crystallographica C started accepting papers electronically as Crystallographic Information Files (CIFs). During that time CIF has become a recognized standard adopted by all the major structure-solving packages. The recent 10% per year increase in the submission rate of papers to Acta Cryst. C shows that authors find the format a convenient way to submit their crystal structure for publication. Since the programs checkCIF and printCIF are publicly available on e-mail, it is easy for authors to check their CIFs and to see what their paper will look like in print before the paper is submitted. They just e-mail their CIF to checkcif@iucr.ac.uk or printcif@iucr.ac.uk and the results are returned within a few minutes.

However, crystallographers who think that CIF is nothing more than a convenient way to submit structure reports to Acta Cryst. do not realise that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Those who skipped the excursion at the IUCr Congress in Seattle to attend the CIF workshop were treated to a review of the large amount of work that has been going on behind the scenes. Soon to be published are a much needed addition to the original (core) dictio nary and a dictionary for powder diffraction that will allow Rietveld refinements to be submitted electronically to Acta Cryst. C and powder patterns to be submitted to the International Centre for Diffraction Data. A major dictionary for macromolecular crystallography is near completion and will do for Acta Cryst. D and the Protein Data Bank what the core dictionary has one for Acta Cryst. C and the Cambridge Data Base. In a less advanced state are CIF dictionaries for symmetry and modulated structures, and discussions are under way to create standards for area detector images and graphics. Complementing all these new dictionaries is an array of new software to edit and manipulate CIFs. When all these projects come to fruition, CIF will be not just a format for reporting the crystal structures of small molecules, but a standard that underpins a sophisticated crystallographic data handling system designed to allow crystallographers to exploit the full potential of modern computers on the Internet. To find the latest information about CIF visit the CIF home page (http://www.iucr.ac.uk/cif/home.html) where you will find documentation on CIF, links to existing dictionaries, and pointers to work in progress on different aspects of CIF.

Watch CIF news in future issues of the IUCr Newsletter for further information on these projects and how they will affect you.