Happy New Year from CrystEngComm!

Happy New Year to all our readers and authors! We very much hope that 2005 proves to be a successful year for you all.

CrystEngComm has had a number of successes in 2004, most notably the publication of the journal’s very first Impact Factor¹ of 2.730. This, together with the fact that CrystEngComm typically publishes articles in as little as 57 days (32 days for communications) and that the journal truly is a world-class journal, shows that CrystEngComm provides the best publishing service for the world-wide crystal engineering community. In 2004, CrystEngComm published contributions from 22 different countries. An overview of the international nature of the journal is given in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Geographical distribution of articles published in CrystEngComm in 2004.

CrystEngComm published a number of excellent highlights articles in 2004. These cover a range of crystal engineering topics, from crystal structure prediction to soft matter. Highlights are highly cited and very much appreciated by the readership of CrystEngComm because they provide rapid access to hot topics as well as overviews of the state-of-the-art in “mainstream” crystal engineering subjects. The full list of highlight articles published in 2004 is given in Table 1. The subjects covered by the 2004 highlights span topics from database investigations to crystal engineering synthetic strategies, and cover the industrial relevance of crystal engineering approaches, including polymorphism, as well as the use of computational tools to address crystal structure and polymorph prediction.

Table 1 CrystEngComm highlights in 2004

Title	Ref.
The innovative momentum of crystal engineering	2
Probing helix formation in chains of vertex-linked octahedra	3
Structure and order in soft matter: symmetry transcending length scale	4
Quantifying intermolecular interactions and their use in computational crystal structure prediction	5
Reflection on molecular tectonics	6
Questions for crystal engineering of halocuprate complexes: concepts for a difficult system	7
CH/π hydrogen bonds in crystals	8

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In October 2004, the journal published a ‘special issue’ containing highlights and full papers arising from the second CrystEngComm Discussion meeting, New Trends in Crystal Engineering, a very successful meeting held in Nottingham, United Kingdom. See http://www.rsc.org/is/journals/current/crystengcomm/discussion2.htm for the full list of articles presented at the meeting. The discussion that accompanied the presentation of papers at the meeting highlighted the current development of crystal engineering and pointed to the emergence of areas that will enhance its future potential. In particular, the papers focused on four main aspects: (i) intermolecular interactions: evaluation and application to crystal design; (ii) networks: design and applications; (iii) approaches to crystal synthesis; (iv) polymorphism, solvates and chiral crystal resolution. A highlight article summarizing all the crystal engineering science discussed in Nottingham will be soon be available to the readership of CrystEngComm.

Articles that are published in CrystEngComm are now considered for featuring in the RSC's publication, Chemical Science, which aims to draw together the best research articles published in RSC journals, on a monthly basis. Two CrystEngComm articles have been thus featured and highlighted to an even wider audience: A ¹H NMR study of crystal nucleation in solution by A. Spitaleri et al.⁹ and Supramolecular synthon competition in organic sulfonates: A CSD survey by D. A. Haynes et al.¹⁰ We fully expect to see more CrystEngComm articles featured in Chemical Science in 2005. More details about Chemical Science can be found on the website http://www.rsc.org/chemicalscience

CrystEngComm developed even further the services it provides to the crystal engineering community through the launch in September 2004 of CrystEngCommunity, the website for all crystal engineers. CrystEngCommunity (http://www.crystengcommunity.org) provides researchers with much information, including Research Group profiles, links to crystal engineering research groups and links to databases. CrystEngCommunity will continue to be developed and we encourage you to let us know what you think of this resource and in what ways you like to see that development proceeds to meet the needs of the community.

In 2004 the online service for CrystEngComm authors and referees got even better, with the launch of ReSourCe (http://www.rsc.org/resource). CrystEngComm referees can update their details to ensure they are sent only the most appropriate article to peer-review, and even see the outcome of the peer-review process for papers that they have reviewed for RSC journals. Authors can, amongst other features, keep track of submitted articles in real time, simply by consulting their information on ReSourCe. The development and launch of ReSourCe demonstrate one of the ways in which RSC works to provide the best publishing service for the chemical science research community.

The RSC has strived to develop tools to help authors with the publication process. A recent collaboration with the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics (at the University of Cambridge, UK) has resulted in the launch of the Experimental Data Checker—a java applet which analyses experimental data. Its aim is to provide helpful information which an author can use to improve a paper, a referee can use to check a paper and a reader can use to analyse a paper. A detailed study of this has been published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.¹¹

We thank retiring members of the CrystEngComm Editorial Board, Professors Gautam Desiraju and Joel Miller and Professors Bart Kahr, John MacDonald and Tobin Marks from the Advisory Board for their efforts to develop the journal since its launch in 1999. Professors Desiraju and Miller will join the Advisory Board from January 2005. We welcome in January 2005 three new members of the Editorial Board: Professors Lia Addadi, Weizmann Institute, Israel, Ashwini Nangia, Hyderabad, India, and Concepcio Rovira, Barcelona, Spain.

The CrystEngComm Editorial Board and Editorial Office feel very much that CrystEngComm is the journal for the international crystal engineering community. The future development of the journal will depend on what you, the CrystEngComm readers and authors, want from the journal. Please send any suggestions to the Editorial Office (E-mail: crystengcomm@rsc.org)

Dario Braga, Scientific Editor

Lee Brammer, Chair, Editorial Board

Jamie Humphrey, Managing Editor

References

1. D. Braga, L. Brammer and J. Humphrey, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, E3.
2. P. Erk, H. Hengelsberg, M. F. Haddow and P. van Gelder, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 475.
3. P. A. Maggard, A. L. Kopf, C. L. Stern and K. P. Poeppelmeier, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 452.
4. M. D. Ward and M. J. Horner, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 401.
5. S. L. Price, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 344.
6. M. W. Hosseini, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 318.
7. C. H. Arnby, S. Jagner and I. Dance, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 257.
8. M. Nishio, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 130.
9. A. Spitaleri, C. A. Hunter, J. F. McCabe, M. J. Packer and S. L. Cockroft, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 489.
10. D. A. Haynes, J. A. Chisholm, W. Jones and W. D. S. Motherwell, CrystEngComm, 2004, 6, 584.
11. S. E. Adams, J. M. Goodman, R. J. Kidd, A. D. McNaught, P. Murray-Rust, F. R. Norton, J. A. Townsend and C. A. Waudby, Org. Biol. Chem., 204, 3067.

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