100th Research Communication published in Acta Crystallographica Section E

The relaunch of Acta Crystallographica Section E (http://journals.iucr.org/e) in June this year (2014) saw the publication of the first papers in the new Research Communication format designed to bring out the science behind the structure determination.

Reports are no longer limited to a short description of a single structure and figures are no longer relegated to the Supporting information. We are delighted to see that an increasing number of authors are choosing to publish their work as a Research Communication, with the numbers of these articles increasing every month. The November issue includes the one hundredth paper to be published in this format, so what better time to celebrate the great breadth in the range and scope of the Research Communications published so far?

Authors are positively encouraged to report and discuss related structures in a single Research Communication rather than publishing a series of short structural reports. We are pleased to see that papers reporting two structures are a now regular feature and one three-structure paper has been published. Authors have made the most of the opportunity to include extra tables and figures in the published paper to illustrate their results and enhance the discussion of the underlying science.

We would like to see even more of our authors old and new submit to the journal in this format. Our editors and many of our authors already take advantage of the IUCr's publCIF software to write and edit their papers using a word-processing environment. publCIF takes a crystallographic information file (CIF) and prepares a formatted paper (preprint) in the Research Communication style. The CIF and the preprint are presented side-by-side and can both be edited - changes made to one are applied to the other as you type. publCIF also includes many useful editorial tools to help you write your paper. It can be used to add data items required for publication, prepare standard and customized geometry tables, check your CIF for both syntax and completeness, print or export a preprint of your paper, check the references and more. Using publCIF, a Research Communication can be produced with just a little extra effort. Be sure to use the latest version of publCIF, which is available to download free of charge from http://publcif.iucr.org.

A large part of the success of the new Research Communication format is down to our dedicated team of Co-editors who are doing an excellent job in advising authors how to promote their science. On behalf of the Section Editors of Acta E, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for helping make Acta Crystallographica Section E the obvious choice for disseminating the results of the excellent crystallography that is being carried out by our authors worldwide.

This announcement is a short excerpt taken from the editorial [Stoeckli-Evans (2014). Acta Cryst. E70, 454-455; doi:10.1107/S1600536814023393].

See our earlier news story covering Acta Crystallographica Section E editorial changes here.