Acta Crystallographica

About Acta Crystallographica

Overview

Acta Crystallographica is the flagship journal family of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), the global scientific body devoted to crystallography and structural science. Established in 1948 as a single journal alongside the founding of the IUCr itself, Acta Crystallographica has grown into a family of six independent, peer-reviewed sections — A through F — covering the full span of structural science, from the mathematical foundations of crystallography to macromolecular structural biology. The journals are published by the IUCr, a not-for-profit organisation co-publishing with Wiley, from Chester, England.

The journal family is widely regarded as one of the highest-quality outlets in crystallography, noted both for the rigour of its papers and for the outsized influence its articles have had on the development of the field. Because the six sections share a common publisher, a common online platform at journals.iucr.org, and a common set of author services and publication ethics, they are often discussed together as a single journal enterprise — while each section operates with its own editorial board, aims and scope, and citation metrics.

Quick Facts

The Six Sections

What began as one journal is today six independent titles. Each has its own subtitle, ISSN, editorial board, and readership:

ISSN, CODEN, and DOI-prefix details above for Sections A, B, and C are taken from the official IUCr journal information pages; titles and focus descriptions for Sections D, E, and F follow the widely used reference descriptions of the family. Section D began as Biological Crystallography; Section E is fully open access; all six titles are listed as part of the IUCr journal portfolio alongside the Journal of Applied Crystallography, the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, the open-access IUCrJ, and the data publication IUCrData.

History: From a Single Journal to a Family

Acta Crystallographica was established in conjunction with the foundation of the International Union of Crystallography in 1948. Both were created to maintain an international forum for crystallography after the Second World War had disrupted international subscriptions and led to the eventual nine-year closure of the main pre-war crystallography journal, Zeitschrift für Kristallographie (per the historical account on Wikipedia, itself citing IUCr sources).

The founding editor was P. P. Ewald, who set out the journal’s mission in the preface to the first issue: Acta Crystallographica was intended to offer a central place for the publication and discussion of research across a vast field bordering on physics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, technology, and mathematics — distinguished by its concern with the methods and results of investigating the arrangement of atoms in matter.

The journal’s subsequent history tracks the explosive growth of crystallography itself:

• 1948 — First issue published (March 1948); P. P. Ewald founding editor.
• 1968 — A steady rise in submissions led to the journal being split into Section A (fundamental and theoretical studies) and Section B (reports of structures), together with the launch of a new sister journal, the Journal of Applied Crystallography.
• 1983 — Section C (Crystal Structure Communications) was added to absorb the flood of routine small-molecule structure reports; beginning with Volume 39 (January 1983), the journal appeared in three sections: A (one volume, six parts per year), B (one volume, six parts per year), and C (one volume, twelve parts per year). Section B was retitled Structural Science and refocused on papers relating atomic arrangement to chemical, physical, biological, metallurgical, and mineralogical properties.
• 1993 — Section D launched to serve the rapid expansion of biological crystallography.
• 1999–2000 — Online versions launched (1999); electronic article submission and online subscription access began (2000).
• 2001 — Section E, an online-only journal for brief reports of new small-molecule structures; it became fully open access in 2008.
• 2004 — Publishing moved from Munksgaard (Denmark) to Wiley-Blackwell after Wiley acquired Munksgaard; the journals are now co-published by the IUCr and Wiley.
• 2005 — Section F, a second online-only journal, for short reports of macromolecular structures and crystallization reports.
• 2013–2014 — The sections adopted their current subtitles: Section A became Foundations and Advances, Section B became Structural Science, Crystal Engineering and Materials, and Section C became Structural Chemistry. From 2014 the IUCr moved to online-only publication for all its journals, and launched the fully open-access flagship IUCrJ.

The early titles evolved along the way: Section A began as Crystal Physics, Diffraction, Theoretical and General Crystallography, became Foundations of Crystallography in 1982, and took its present subtitle in 2013/2014. Section B’s earlier titles include Structural Crystallography and Crystal Chemistry (ISSN 0567-7408, published in Denmark, accepting English, French, and German) and Structural Science (ISSN 0108-7681); since 2013 it publishes in English only.

The Publisher: A Not-for-Profit, Community-Owned Model

The International Union of Crystallography is a not-for-profit organisation owned by the crystallographic community and governed by a General Assembly and an Executive Committee. It is a member of the International Science Council. Its stated objectives include promoting international cooperation in crystallography, facilitating standardisation of methods, units, nomenclatures, and symbols, and serving as a focus for crystallography’s relations with other sciences.

Publishing is one of the IUCr’s principal activities: the Union publishes its journals through the Acta Crystallographica series, the Journal of Applied Crystallography, the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, and IUCrJ, as well as the reference series International Tables for Crystallography, the quarterly IUCr Newsletter, and the online World Directory of Crystallographers. It also awards the Ewald Prize and organises the triennial Congress and General Assembly.

Because the publisher is a scientific union rather than a commercial house, the journals operate without submission fees, page charges, or colour charges (confirmed on the official information pages for Sections A, B, and C), and accepted manuscripts may be deposited under green open access with no embargo.

Editorial Leadership

Each section is led by its own editorial board of working crystallographers, with editors-in-chief, co-editors, commissioning editors, book-review editors, and — in recent years — early-career boards. Current leadership (per the official IUCr editorial-board pages) includes:

• Section A — Editors-in-chief: A. Altomare (Institute of Crystallography, CNR, Bari, Italy) and S. J. L. Billinge (UC Santa Barbara, USA). Co-editors include specialists in symmetry, electron crystallography, quantum crystallography, diffuse scattering, and cryo-EM (M. I. Aroyo, B. J. Campbell, M. L. A. N. De Las Peñas, P. M. Dominiak, T. E. Gorelik, W. Hornfeck, K. M. Ø. Jensen, I. Margiolaki, L. Palatinus, A. Singer, I. A. Vartaniants, P. R. Willmott), with K. M. Ø. Jensen as commissioning editor and M. Nespolo as book-review editor.
• Section B — Editors-in-chief: Louise Dawe (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), Andrzej Katrusiak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland), and Ashwini Nangia (UPES, Dehradun, India). Fourteen co-editors span crystal growth, high-pressure crystallography, neutron scattering, electron microscopy, and crystal engineering, with M. Nespolo as book-review editor.
• Section C — Editors-in-chief: Alan R. Kennedy (University of Strathclyde, UK), Amy Sarjeant (Bristol-Myers Squibb, USA), and Jonathan White (University of Melbourne, Australia). Eighteen co-editors plus a large review board cover chemical crystallography, MOFs, pharmaceuticals, polymorphs, and neutron diffraction; Muhammed Yousufuddin serves as commissioning editor.

Full rosters with affiliations, subject responsibilities, and contact details are published on each journal’s official editorial-board page. Editorial offices are based at the IUCr’s Chester headquarters.

Peer Review Process

All sections operate formal peer review — single-blind for Sections A, B, and C, per the journals’ official information pages. Manuscripts are submitted through the IUCr’s online submission system, assigned to a co-editor with matching subject expertise, and evaluated by independent referees. The IUCr provides authors with online tools to help prepare papers — including the widely used checkCIF validation service for crystallographic information files — Word and LaTeX templates, and professional technical editing. Supporting information can be published alongside articles, and authors can track manuscript status online.

Published 2025 journal statistics illustrate the selectivity and throughput of the three sections: Section A received 94 submissions with a 62% acceptance rate and an average publication time of 5.9 months (52 articles); Section B received 92 submissions with a 64% acceptance rate and 4.7 months average (67 articles); Section C received 127 submissions with a 72% acceptance rate and 2.9 months average (95 articles). Figures are from the journals’ own published statistics.

Aims and Scope Across the Family

Section A: Foundations and Advances publishes fundamental and mathematical advances in the practice and theory of structural science in the broadest sense — from traditional crystallography to nanocrystals, metacrystals, amorphous materials, and quasicrystals. Coverage extends to electron crystallography, diffuse scattering, pair distribution function studies, time-resolved XFEL studies, cryo-EM, tomography, small-angle scattering, coherent scattering, diffraction imaging, and the structure of strain and defects. Advances in analysis tools — methods, algorithms, software, and AI/machine-learning approaches to structural science — are also welcomed.

Section B: Structural Science, Crystal Engineering and Materials advances understanding of structural science as it relates to compounds and materials: how atomic arrangements, and their variation with temperature, pressure, and other factors, govern physical and chemical properties and inform the design of new materials and supramolecular systems. Topics include crystal growth and nucleation, structure–property relationships, polymorphism and phase transitions, multicomponent crystals, (bio)minerals and natural products, crystal-structure prediction and machine learning, and advances in X-ray, neutron, and electron diffraction. Short best-practice articles on experimental technique and data interpretation are welcomed.

Section C: Structural Chemistry is positioned as the premier venue for studies where structural insights drive breakthroughs across the chemical sciences. Articles report results from electron, powder, and X-ray diffraction as well as spectroscopic and computational techniques, covering polymorphs, coordination polymers, inorganics and minerals, liquid crystals, nanostructures, pharmaceutical compounds, and natural products. Data-driven discovery studies that mine crystallographic and spectroscopic databases are featured, as are short best-practice articles on small-molecule crystallography. Submissions may be in any format, including Word or CIF.

Sections D, E, and F serve structural biology (D), rapid small-molecule structure communications (E, fully open access), and macromolecular crystallization communications (F).

Indexing and Abstracting

The family is extensively indexed. Section A is covered by Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents (Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences), INSPEC, J-Gate, Medline, the ProQuest Materials Science Database, PubMed Central, Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, the Cambridge Structural Database, and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. Sections B and C add Biological Abstracts, Ceramic Abstracts, Crossref, the Current Chemical Reactions Database, Google Scholar, Metals Abstracts/METADEX, the Reaction Citation Index, the Science Citation Index, SCISEARCH, and — for B — the Nucleic Acid Database and the Protein Data Bank. Lists are per the journals’ official abstracting pages.

Impact Metrics (Official 2025 JCR Data, via IUCr Journal Pages)

All figures are reproduced from the official IUCr journal information pages, which display 2025 Journal Citation Reports data. Third-party aggregators publish slightly different snapshot values (for example, approximately 2.1/2.5/1.1 for the 2024 impact factors per CrossRef-based compilations); the table above reflects the journals’ own published data.

Open Access and Publishing Costs

The journals operate a hybrid open-access policy, with transformative arrangements available through institutions. The open-access option is priced from USD 2,080 for Sections A and B and from USD 1,880 for Section C; the open-access licence is Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0 International). There are no submission fees, page charges, or colour charges. Green open access is supported: author accepted manuscripts may be deposited with no embargo under a CC-BY licence. Section E is fully open access.

Publication Ethics and Policies

Each journal publishes detailed editorial policies covering ethics, author rights, copyright and licensing, article correction and retraction, the NIH public access policy, and permissions requests. The IUCr also publishes a diversity and inclusion statement affirming that all aspects of the publication process should maximise inclusion and diversity. Formal COPE membership was not independently verified for this profile and is therefore not asserted here; readers should consult the journals’ official policy pages for the current position.

Author and Reader Services

For authors: online manuscript submission, Word and LaTeX templates, online preparation tools (including structure-validation utilities), quality technical editing, publishable supporting information, online status tracking, article publicity, and download/citation/altmetrics statistics. For readers: email alerting, RSS feeds, forthcoming-article listings, highlighted and open-access article collections, online access to all articles back to the first issue, full-text/keyword/abstract searching, links to World Directory of Crystallographers entries, citation links to IUCr journals, Chemical Abstracts Service, Crossref, Medline, and Web of Science, interactive three-dimensional structure visualisations, links to structural databases, and hyperlinks to the IUCr Online Dictionary of Crystallography and the IUPAC Gold Book.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Acta Crystallographica?

It is the flagship journal family of the International Union of Crystallography, founded in 1948. Today it comprises six independent peer-reviewed sections (A–F) covering foundations of crystallography, structural science and materials, structural chemistry, structural biology, and rapid structure communications.

Who publishes Acta Crystallographica?

The International Union of Crystallography, a not-for-profit organisation owned by the crystallographic community, co-publishing with Wiley. The editorial offices are at 5 Abbey Square, Chester, England.

Is Acta Crystallographica open access?

The journals operate hybrid open access: articles are free to publish with no submission fees or page charges, and authors may choose paid open access (from USD 1,880–2,080 depending on section) under CC-BY 4.0. Green open access deposit of accepted manuscripts is allowed with no embargo. Section E is fully open access.

Which section should I submit to?

Foundational and methodological advances go to Section A; structure–property, crystal-engineering, and materials studies to Section B; small-molecule structural chemistry to Section C; macromolecular work to Sections D or F; and brief new-structure reports to Section E. Each journal’s official aims-and-scope page gives detailed guidance.

What is checkCIF?

checkCIF is the IUCr’s online validation service for crystallographic information files (CIFs). Authors submitting crystal structures to IUCr journals use it to check their data against publication standards before and during peer review.

How far back does the online archive go?

Readers have online access to all articles back to the first issue (1948), with forthcoming-article listings, citation tracking, and links to structural databases such as the Cambridge Structural Database and the Protein Data Bank.

Profile compiled from the official IUCr journal information pages (journals.iucr.org), the IUCr governance pages (iucr.org), and standard reference histories of the journal family. Metric figures are the journals’ own published 2025 JCR data. Fields that could not be verified from official sources have been left unstated.