Acta E transforms from Structure Reports Online to Crystallographic Communications

At the start of the millennium, the IUCr decided to launch its first fully electronic journal, Structure Reports Online (Section E of Acta Crystallographica), with its founding Main Editors William Clegg (Newcastle, UK) and David Watson (Cambridge, UK). The first issue appeared on 1 January 2001 reporting crystal structure results across a wide range of inorganic, organic and metal-organic materials in a richly hyperlinked HTML format with access to the complete diffraction data, the submitted CIF, and the full checking output. As the only IUCr journal publishing short format articles for small molecule structures, Acta E, with its high standards of validation, proved very popular in the community. In 2008, the journal became open access. In order to make open access affordable to authors, the format of published papers was shortened, resulting in large numbers of papers being published, averaging around 4000 per annum in the five-year period 2008–2012. During this period, discussion of structure, its scientific significance or value to the wider community was barely presented in the published paper. This went against the vision of the founders of Acta Cryst. Paul Ewald, the founding Editor wrote in his inaugural editorial in 1948 'the results of crystal investigations should be presented to physicists, chemists, mineralogists, metallurgists and biologists in a form which enables them to grasp readily the implications for their sciences'. Ewald went on to write 66 years ago, 'it is essential that the methods by which the results have been gained, and the data on which they are founded, should be fully published so that they may be subjected to the expert criticism necessary to assess their reliability'. This remains true even today. All of the Acta Cryst. journals must strive to keep this balance of high-quality data and structures with clear commentary on the scientific significance of the structural results to at least the relevant scientific community. The year 2014 has seen major changes across all IUCr journals, designed to ensure that the widest possible range of science that relies on structural information is reported. Both Acta B and Acta C have undergone a major change with significant strengthening of the editorial boards. As many of our readers will know, Acta B is now called Structural Science, Crystal Engineering and Materials while Acta C is now simply called Structural Chemistry. Both of these journals have already published a number of special issues, which have begun to …