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Henry Chapman and Xiaodong Zou have recently been appointed as Main Editors of IUCrJ .

The development by a scientific learned society of data description and exchange standards has revolutionized the publication of journal articles in crystallography. Data validation has become an essential element in peer review. Submission, review, and handling of articles are carried out faster, more efficiently, and more consistently. The full data to support a scientific model are made available to the reader, allowing molecular structures to be visualized and analysed. The journals provide a much more complete account of the scientific record, in a model that should appeal to other data-rich scientific disciplines.

The determination of molecular structures of biological and chemical interest is a major role of applied crystallography worldwide today. Where once each new structure represented a hard-won research result, improvements in technique, technology and computational power have brought large-scale structure determination efforts well into the realm of e-science. Half a million crystal structures of 'small' molecules and over 35,000 protein and nucleic-acid crystal structures are publicly available. Many more structures have been determined but never published; increasingly these are being disseminated over the web. The crystallographic community is energetic through the activities of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) in its efforts to uphold quality standards in a diverse scientific environment. The IUCr has developed a data exchange standard, the crystallographic information file (CIF), and associated data dictionaries. These have allowed the seamless transfer of information from the experimental apparatus, through computation analysis, to database deposition and publication. The formal data language of CIF also allows the definition of quality standards for data deposition and publication, and the deployment of mechanisms for checking compliance with such standards, such as the checkCIF web service. This article discusses the role of the crystallographic journals owned by the IUCr in maintaining quality of information and data for effective peer-reviewed publishing of advances in crystallographic science, and the possibilities provided by the CIF dictionaries for future semantic web applications.

The journals of the International Union of Crystallography have grown in size and number over the past 60 years to match developments in scientific practice and technique. High quality of publication has always been at the forefront of editorial policy and ways in which this has been achieved are described. In particular, the development of standard exchange and archive formats for crystallographic data has allowed the editorial office to conduct automated analyses of structural data supporting articles submitted for publication and these analyses assist the scientific editors in careful and critical peer review. The new information technologies of the Internet age have allowed the IUCr journals to flourish and to provide a wide range of powerful services to authors, editors and readers alike. The integration of literature and supporting structural data is of particular importance. The new technologies have also brought fresh economic and cultural challenges, and offer completely new opportunities to disseminate the results of scientific research. The journals continue to respond to these challenges and take advantage of new opportunities in innovative ways.

Keywords: editorial ; Shelx Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-172245doi:10.1107/S0108767310041504View record in Web of Science Record created on 2011-12-16, modified on 2017-05-12