International Union of Crystallography

This collection features a number of chemistry-related articles taken from IUCrJ the new flagship open access journal

IUCrJ celebrates its first year of publication

ScienceOpen Research

ScienceOpen

Main article text

To coincide with the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr2014), IUCr Journals launched the comprehensive open-access journal IUCrJ in January 2014. The journal has had an excellent first year, and has already started to establish itself within the wider scientific communities that use results obtained from diffraction methods. All the indications are good in terms of the journal making a strong impact in attracting high-quality science papers of wide scientific significance from these communities. First impressions from authors, readers, referees and commentators are very positive with a number of papers receiving high downloads in line with high-impact publications.

In addition to providing high-impact high-profile publications, IUCrJ also aims to provide fast publication for authors. Submissions undergo preliminary screening by a panel consisting of the five Main Editors (Ted Baker, Richard Catlow, Gautam Desiraju, Sine Larsen, John Spence) and the Editor-in-Chief (Samar Hasnain), and this has helped to provide a rapid and efficient review process. Preliminary screening is generally complete within 72 hours, and any articles that do not meet the journal's requirement for broad scientific significance are usually transferred, with the agreement of the authors, to one of our other journals. Such transfers are seamless and do not require any further work by the authors.

The six issues of IUCrJ published in 2014 have featured papers from a wide variety of areas including biology, chemistry, crystal engineering, materials, physics and FELs.

The number of articles submitted to the journal in its first year was 130; this was well ahead of our target of 100 articles. A total of 72 papers have been published with an average turnaround time of 14 weeks.

IUCrJ has set out to become the natural home for reporting breakthroughs and 'full' science reports rather than simply reporting a structure or how it was determined.We welcome your impressions of the first year of IUCrJ and ideas of measures we should collectively take for its widest acceptance by the broadest possible community.

We feel that we have made an excellent start and have attracted many high-quality submissions in all of the areas we cover. To maintain this confident start we encourage continued pro-active engagement from the whole structural community in improving the rate of submission of high-quality papers across the board.

We want IUCrJ to become the leading journal for high-quality structure-based papers in the chemical and biological sciences. We remind these communities to consider IUCrJ as one of their first choice journals for their work that may have broader appeal. In addition, we will continue to work closely with physicists, material scientists, computational crystallographers and pioneering FEL scientists to ensure that IUCrJ is able to meet the expectations of these communities.

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ScienceOpen Research
ScienceOpen
12 February 2015
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