Crystal Structure EPrints: Publication @ Source Through the Open Archive Initiative

Abstract

Recent advances in crystallographic instrumentation and computational resources have caused an explosion of crystallographic data, as shown by the recent exponential growth of the CSD [1]. However, even this is considered to be lower than expected, following the introduction of area detection. The reason for this is clearly identified as a publication bottleneck, which will become even more severe with developments in high throughput crystallography [2]. As a result of this situation, the user community is deprived of valuable information, and the funding bodies are getting a poor return for their investments! Electronic publishing has helped to make some inroads into the problem, and is already an integral part of chemical and crystallographic publishing. This has dramatically reduced the turnaround time in the publication process, but the system still fails to keep apace of the generation of structural information, mainly because of the continued reliance on traditional protocols for the assembly of manuscripts and their peer review. The need to maintain some kind of review process is clear, and this makes the sometimes-used direct submission of structures to the CCDC “unpopular”. Unlike the mathematical and electronic sciences, the chemical sciences have been reluctant to embrace the 'preprint concept' [3]: the one exception has been the efforts of rapid electronic communications journals. This poster outlines a pre-print procedure for the rapid and effective dissemination of structural information to the scientific community which removes the lengthy peer review process that hampers traditional publication routes, but provides an alternative mechanism. Crystallographic EPrints are built on a concept developed in the Computer Science community [4] whereby an author may reveal to the public archives of information. An Eprint makes available all raw, derived and results data from a crystallographic experiment via a searchable and hierarchical system. At the top searchable level this metadata includes bibliographic and chemical identifier items which allow access to a secondary level of searchable crystallographic items which are directly linked to the associated archived data. Hence the results of a crystal structure determination may be disseminated in a manner that anyone wishing to utilise the information may access the entire archive of data related to it and assess its validity and worth.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Simon J Coles: orcid.org/0000-0001-8414-9272

ORCID for Jeremy G Frey: orcid.org/0000-0003-0842-4302

ORCID for Leslie A Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

ORCID for Christopher J Gutteridge: orcid.org/0000-0001-9201-5987

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