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Journal developments

The Glasgow Congress saw the latest stage in the electronic development of IUCr journals – the launch of Crystallography Journals Online, the culmination of years of work by the editorial and research and development groups at the Chester Office.

In recent years developments at the Chester Office have been geared to ensuring the rapid, accurate and high-quality publication of the Union's journals, Acta Crystallographica, Journal of Applied Crystallography and Journal of Synchrotron Radiation. Our aims have been to improve the speed of publication, increase the efficiency of review, technical editing and printing processes, and provide electronic versions of the journals.

Nearly all the production work on the journals is now carried out in Chester. Manuscripts, typically submitted in CIF, Microsoft Word and TeX formats, are converted to SGML (standard generalized markup language), the publishing industry standard for electronic publishing. The SGML is then used to drive the typesetting process, as well as acting as the source for the online versions of the journals.

Pilot projects have been started to look into electronic submission and review procedures. Proofs and reprints are now routinely supplied in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, and from the start of 2000 authors have been given permission to load these electronic reprints on their personal web sites.

Crystallography Journals Online has been developed with the needs of the crystallographic community in mind. It currently provides full text versions of all of the IUCr journals in both HTML and PDF formats, and all supporting data are made available via the IUCr electronic archive. Other services such as e-mail alerting, tables of contents and details of forthcoming papers are available. Crystallography Journals Online currently links into the Medline and PDB databases, and it is our intention to work with other relevant bibliographic and structural databases, and primary publishers to improve linking to and from the journals.

Free access to Crystallography Journals Online has been extended until May 2000. Make sure that your library has a subscription before this date to ensure that you continue to have access to the service.

Peter Strickland, Managing Editor, and Brian McMahon, R&D Officer
 
17 November 2008