IUCr forums

I am writing to let you know that I have updated my previous post with subscription information, and am also providing additional information in a table in the attachment that may help in assessing the financial risk if a journal was closed.

Thus, the table gives an idea of direct revenue loss if a journal were to be closed, together with the revenue that might also be at risk (i.e. revenue in packages that contain that journal and would likely be subject to review by librarians).

As an example, if Section A were to be closed, the direct loss in revenue from subscriptions would be £204,596; in addition, packages containing Section A (A+B+C, A+B+C+D and full) would potentially be at risk. The total value of these packages is £1094991. It would be pessimistic to think that the total loss of income would be at this level, but equally the loss would more than likely be higher than the value of the direct subscription income alone.

Note that direct subscription and consortial income is included in the above figures.

I am posting a summary of points made by Ashwini.

Suggestions for IUCr journals from Ashwini Nangia

These are my first cut impressions after reviewing journals data, IF, number of papers, downloads statistics, classifications of various journals, etc.

1. All journals must be made ONLINE ONLY

2. Print issues for libraries, archives, display purpose only. E-journals to be promoted and made default option

3. Referencing format be made numerical (1, 2, 3, ..) instead of (author name, year). Saves space and is easier to locate a reference for readers

4. Graded levels of check cif criteria and cut offs to be applied for different journals
a. Acta C and Acta E – highest standard, no change
b. Acta B – slightly relaxed, leeway to editor so that a full study with 1 or 2 less qualified crystal structures which are part of a related family may be accepted
c. Acta A – journal identity to be changed (see below), check cif like Acta B
d. Acta F and Acta D – not an expert in macromolecular but same idea as above

5. The number of IUCr journals can be condensed to a smaller number and made more focused keeping in line current trends in crystallography
a. Acta A – to be rechristened as an all areas frontline and flagship journal of IUCR with a name like Advances in Crystallography featuring reviews, communications, full articles, perspectives, etc. Will cover everything under all IUCr commissions.
b. Acta B – no change, but can target more chemical and materials and pharmaceutical authors with a slight relaxation of cif standards as mentioned above
c. Acta C and Acta E – to be merged to a single journal with two categories of structure reports, with say titles Full reports and Short reports. It will be like a IUCr inspected sub-archive of high quality crystal structures
d. Acta D and Acta F – no changes
e. JAC and JSR to be merged as a new Acta journal with subject category Crystallography Techniques, Computing and Radiation Sources. If Acta C and E are merged, and D and F renamed in alphabetical order, then this will become new Acta F

6. Timelines in review process can be shortened in a number of ways. The biggest and best bonus for editors is reward linked to number of papers handled and average number of days taken to process manuscript, e.g. when they attend Journals Committee and IUCr Congress meeting

7. A general comment is that currently the best in crystallography may not qualify to be published in an IUCr journal. This is tragic and must be rectified. An example is a recent paper entitled Crystallographic Realization of the Mathematically Predicted Densest All-Pentagon Packing Lattice by C5-Symmetric “Sticky” Fluoropentamers published in Angew Chem 2011 10612 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201101553. The R factor is R1 (0.1495) and wR2 (0.2957). A check cif obviously raises many red alerts. But it is crystallography.

I promised some time ago to provide further information on
subscriptions/consortial sales. I have now worked with Mike Dacombe to
produce the summary below, which I hope gives a clearer picture of this
matter. I have also attached a document provided to us by Wiley-Blackwell in
2009 that describes purchasing options, allocation of revenues and licencing
for consortia. These arrangements change slightly from year to year but
represent current practice fairly closely. I have also attached an updated
forecast for 2011 that now includes income and expenditure columns for
each journal.


Consortial sales

There are 522 full subscribers with either "title-by-title" or "core"
subscriptions; in addition, a further ~3500 consortial members gain access to
our journals via an "unsubscribed collection licencing fee" or via
arrangements for developing countries. The full subscribers account for 1920
subscriptions:

124 have a subscription to 1 title
49 have subscriptions to 2 titles
42 have subscriptions to 3 titles
128 have subscriptions to 4 titles
112 have subscriptions to 5 titles
67 have a full set of subscriptions (6 titles)

6 consortial groups take 96 subscriptions between them, OhioLink being the
largest consortia group with 44 subscriptions.

Overall there are:

392 with a subscription to Acta A (£158,763)
387 with a subscription to Acta B (£170,102)
378 with a subscription to Acta C (£418,451)
357 with a subscription to Acta D (£195,618)
303 with a subscription to JAC (£140,499)
103 with a subscription to JSR (£73,383)

Of these, 122 subscribers also have print copies.


Non-consortial sales (personal and institutional)

204 with print + electronic option
189 print only
101 electronic only

155 with a subscription to Acta A (£45,834)
160 with a subscription to Acta B (£49,575)
139 with a subscription to Acta C (£118,474)
184 with a subscription to Acta D (£66,041)
157 with a subscription to JAC (£48,719)
69 with a subscription to JSR (£34,356)

Note that the totals of consortial and non-consortial income are less than those on
the forecast sheet because of additional income (back sales, offprints, sponsorship,
special-issue income etc.).

Gernot,

Just a quick response regarding your comments on Section Editors in anticipation of our meeting next month. You and I seem to be living in different worlds. In my experience having a sympathetic and knowledgeable Editor (and especially Section Editors who may make the decisions and set the tone) makes an enormous difference. First of all he or she understands the field, knows qualified referees and can eliminate unjustifiable reviewers comments, speed up excellent papers, make special arrangements (as I have done in the case of an outstanding paper published in Acta A, not a computer program). But I have also been at the receiving end and have learned which Editors (in non-IUCr journals) to request. The impact factor depends a lot on the quality of the paper. We may not get the best papers, but that also depends a lot on the Editors we select for the journals. Too often not those who may not be only crystallographers, but are also well known in other disciplines. That can be changed in some of the fields, including crystal engineering/supramolecular chemistry.

Philip

There are many interconnected issues that need to be dealt with in our discussions, but I feel we need to separate them to make headway. I would like to identify the following (in descending order of urgency/importance)

Content and Structure

The question of what content we want to see in our journals must be the first priority. The structuring of this content into our journal is important, but should be a consequence of the first issue. I think the question of how to admit correct but less precise structures is at the heart of this. If we manage to do this successfully, we are better prepared to move into new areas where crystallography is an important tool, but where our present-day standards may be overly harsh. There are clearly areas where we have managed this, and it has been to our advantage. Certainly Walter is right that we do not normally get the headline content since we are a specialist journal. Authors will go for generalist journals when able to. Still I think our journals have done well is certain areas. Macromolecular crystallography is one. Acta D is doing well and as the volume of macromolecular work is escalating even further there will be a steady flow of contributions. Here we need to be primed to capture the outcome of proteomics consortia if possible.
Another success story is aperiodic crystallography. Again, data is not always as good as for conventional small molecule work, but there is a lot of interesting science going on. Lots of important work on this has gone to Acta and we should pride ourselves on that. I’m sure you could all contribute similar stories in other fields. The important question is where are we missing out today, and where will we miss out tomorrow? I think there are already things in crystal engineering and nano science that we should be part of as well as crystallography at extreme conditions. Dynamic studies and analysis of diffuse scattering are still very much JSR type studies, but should feature also in our other journals. How do we actively solicit this content?

After listening to and reading lots of opinions I’m getting a feeling that the conversion of Acta A to “Frontiers of Structural Science” may not be such a bad idea. Here we could place cutting edge structural science and reviews on current and coming topics. The roles of B, C and JAC as second tier journal may be a tad controversial, but that would be the price for such a strategy. We might use the successful strategy of JAC in capturing a well-defined segment of authors as an inspiration for how to define B and C. Mathematical and Physical crystallography (B) and Chemical crystallography (C) may be appropriate given the Biological crystallography of D. That would make B the receptacle of a lot of todays submissions to A, but it would better define the relative roles of B and C. We would need statistical input to see if there is viable business for these two branches. My point would be that it would be clearer to authors and editors alike where new areas should fit in this structure.

Finance
The journals are doing reasonably well financially at the moment, and thanks to consortial deals we are not under direct threat. We should be careful about radical change. This is why I would propose maintaining our present journals in a superficial sense while reshuffling content to better define what our intentions are. I think this is possible within our consortial deals, but Pete will be the one to fill me in on this. We cannot be completely insensitive to the H factor game, but we can play it with restraint. Making sure we get the most interesting new content will achieve both our scientific aims and yield improved citation statistics.
Subscription models
The move of E to open access was a necessary and successful one, but other parts of our portfolio are going to be tougher to move. F may be a candidate, but we should move with caution. I’m far from convinced that we should implement such changes simultaneously with a general overhaul. I would be more in favor of asking Pete to start investigating the possibilities for redefined journal in terms of OA.
New journals will need careful business models. Again we need to think about how much the boat should be rocked. We want to be able to evaluate a change, and if everything moves, that may prove difficult.

It may not be very helpful for our discussion but I have to say it once more. It is not only our own fault if we are not able to put new life into our journals. What runs very well is the publication of routine structure analyses and some applied crystallography. Our problem is to attract the excellent original work published in PRL, Nature Materials, PNAS, Angewandte Chemie,..... It is the general decline of classical crystallography, it is the image of crystallography as the science of structure analysis, it is the continuous loss of crystallographic chairs at German and Swiss universities,... Now the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of quasicrystals - more than 10 000 papers have been published on this topic since 1984, how many in one of the IUCr journals? Only around 200, why not more? Most original crystallographic work is done by physicists, chemists, etc. who would not call themselves crystallographers and who are not aware of the fact that they are performing crystallographic research. How can we convince them to publish in crystallographic journals?

Just a quick comment on the posts by Philip and Peter, especially concerning Acta B. The points raised have been reoccurring during the last several years (in fact, the worries about Acta B - and A - have been around, to my limited historical memory, for over ten years), but no immediate remedy has been found. The idea of just adding another Section Editor (a potential insult to the present one; we have rightfully reduced the number of Section Editors for JSR, of similar size, and now we attempt to augment this number for Acta B???) might have helped in the old days, when authors selected a journal because an eminent colleague was in charge. This is not the case any more. Today, the most imnportant 'attractor' is the impact factor, and this results from good papers. In this respect, we are not very successful in any of our journals. Our most highly cited papers are almost exclusively related to computer programs and data handling. If one takes these off, the remainder produces less impressive figures (I will, after I have fully reestablished my working environment following a recent relocation of my office, send some numbers). My main concern is how to improve this situation; competent and expedient service, better visibility of the journals, networking among certain communities (especially around major reserach centers and facilities) and within the Union (Commissions!), new platforms might help. What else?
Best wishes, Gernot

I agree with Philip that work needs to be done on Acta B, particularly to attract authors in the Crystal Engineering field, and that this might be best achieved by considering the appointment of a second Section Editor who is a leader in this field or in Chemical Crystallography. With regard to Acta C, I also agree that we do need to see how the journal could capture "less precise, inaccurate but clearly correct structures".

Regarding a plan B, open access should be seen as a long-term option that we could move to. As a result of the open-access publication of Acta E, we now have a great deal of practical experience that could be used to make such a move. Our main plan is to continue to work with Wiley-Blackwell, ensure that we understand what is happening in the journals market and try to respond quickly to any new developments. We are currently in a reasonably good position to do this, in that we run our own submission and production systems, and also create and host our own web content. This should mean that we continue to have a reasonably strong position in any future negotiations with other publishers.

I am attaching a recently published article that sets out a number of current and future issues related to journals publication that may be of interest to the Committee.

Open Access: A move to more open access would only be realistic if most of the other reputable journals go the same route. For the researcher it involves the extra cost of page charges at a time of tight research funding. Why pay page charges for publication in Union journals as long as other top journals (I am thinking especially of the wide range of excellent American Chemical Society journals) do not require them.
Combining journals: I do not favor combining Acta A with Acta B and JAC with JSR. Crystallography spans a broad range. We would lose a significant part of our contributors if we would dilute the specific flavor of the individual journals by such a retrenchment. JSR, for example, has become a journal of choice for the Community developing and using the Advanced Light Sources and is attracting papers that used to go to Nuclear Instruments and Methods. Acta B should and can recoup a position in the Crystal Engineering field and become a true journal of Chemical Crystallography. Acta C should make room for less accurate but nevertheless correct structures.
The 'Big Deal(s)': We are clearly very sensitive to future developments in this respect. Do we have a plan B apart from the possibility of Open Access? How many of our subscriptions are now electronic only?

Acta A
Acta A is still the flagship of our publications. Most (but not all) of the papers describe new mathematic algorithms, new methods of crystal structure solution, analysis of symmetry in 3D and higher spaces, new approaches to data analysis and measurement. In general the papers are more mathematical than those in other IUCr publications. In most cases Acta A is the only suitable medium for publication of such papers. It thus fulfils an essential function for the Union and for the continuing development of the field. A rapid communication section is attractive. How could we make sure that it is indeed rapid?
One may question if the subtitle 'Foundations of Crystallography' is still appropriate as the foundations of the field have by now been well established. The Committee should discuss other options though a too detailed subtitle should be avoided. The papers deal with fundamental crystallographic issues and often describe new methods. The fundamental aspect remains crucial. Acta B is basically different from Acta A.

Acta B
Papers published in Acta B cover a broad range. They include charge density studies often combined with theoretical calculations, incommensurate structures and quasicrystals, inorganic structures, powder diffraction, some electron diffraction, phase transitions and intermolecular interactions. Although many of the papers are of high quality it is a very diverse collection.
Currently the journal does not play a central role in Chemical Crystallography. Strikingly missing are papers in the large field of crystal engineering and supramolecular crystals. Such papers are presented at ACA meetings and IUCr Congresses but are absent from our journals. A solution would be appointment of a second Section Editor who is a leader in the field and is well known in the Chemical Crystallography Community. Several names come to mind. A special section on Crystal Engineering should be implemented and initiated with a number of invited papers by experts in the field. Grouping other papers according to subject should be considered. The number of charge density and modulated structure papers in Acta B is considerable, even in single issues.

Acta C
This journal clearly fulfils a useful function for rapid publication of structural results. A shortcoming is that inaccurate structures do not pass the bar set by accuracy requirements. Many structure determinations not published in our journals at present aim solely at establishing the connectivity of the atoms and/or the chirality of the molecule. A section on less precise, inaccurate but clearly correct structures would be a service to the chemical sciences. Acta E may cover such structures but it does not allow a discussion of the results.

Journal of Synchrotron Radiation.
The Journal of Synchrotron Radiation is increasingly becoming the Journal of the synchrotron community. Papers published go well beyond crystallographic applications and include imaging, IR, UV and Mossbauer spectroscopy, holography, etc. It is very much a journal of frontier science and does great credit to the Union. Though it is good to see that JSR is now profitable, in this case financial considerations should be secondary.
It is crucial that the title of the journal is suitably amended to include free-electron lasers, which are likely to open completely new crystallographic vistas. We must capture this development and not let publishers jump ahead of us. Possibilities are 'Journal of Synchrotron Radiation and Free Electron Lasers' or adding a subtitle specifying the coverage as is done by Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Additions or changes in titles of journals should be minimized, but are in fact quite common. Two examples are theJournal of Physical Chemistry (split into A and B + the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters) and the Journal of the (UK) Chemical Society (split into several parts).

It is good to see from the documents supplied by Peter that all IUCr journals are profitable, from the cash cow ActaCryst C to the least financially rewarding, JSynchrRad. Less cheering up is the number of subscriptions, which decreased by more than 50% during the last twenty years, if we neglect the beneficial influence of the consortial agreement with Wiley Blackwell.
Concerning the suggestions submitted by Peter, I think that a proceedings journal may bring more service to some meeting organizers and generate some profit. It may be quite useful if it will be established as an open access journal.
I am not so convinced, however, by starting one more journal. Of course, I fully agree that we should have one open access journal, however, it would cannibalize the other IUCr journals. I already suggested to start open access first for a section of a journal, for instance, for a newly to establish Letter/Rapid communication section in ActaCryst A. This would have the advantage that ActaCryst A could still be part of the Wiley Blackwell consortial package and generate income by open access fees.
Perhaps we should also think about an online Virtual Journal of Crystallography. For more information see the home page of the virtual journals of the AIP (http://www.virtualjournals.org/).