Synchrotron radiation sources in the news and JSR goes online
With this issue, we celebrate the ®fth anniversary of the journal. Since the launch, approximately 850 papers and 3800 pages have appeared. The journal has published the proceedings of two main synchrotron radiation conferences, SRI'97 (May 1998 issue) and XAFS X (May 1999 issue), where new standards for these proceedings have been set. The journal now features in the top 17% of the Science Citation Index (4800 journals). Its impact factor is greater than that of Rev. Sci. Instrum., Nucl. Instrum. Methods, J. Phys. A and J. Phys. C, and is approaching that of Phys. Rev. C and Phys. Rev. E. Thus, the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (JSR) has become clearly established and this it owes to the con®dence the community has placed in it from its launch. JSR is continuing to develop and is striving to be the focus of the whole of the synchrotron radiation community from `source to science'. A major development for JSR this year has been the launch in August 1999 of the new and innovative electronic journal service, Synchrotron Radiation Online. This gives easy access to the complete text of all regular 1999 articles. The articles are available in HTML and PDF formats, and are richly hyperlinked for easy navigation within and between articles. The service also provides search mechanisms, e-mail alerting and immediate access to supplementary data. Access is free to the service during 1999, but will require a subscription to the journal in 2000. We ask you to visit http://journals.iucr.org/s/ journalhomepage.html to see the service for yourself. The ®rst Nobel prize for synchrotron radiation-based work, awarded to Sir John Walker of the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (see Editorial, November 1998), was marked by a dedicated issue on structural biology (Vol. 6, Part 4). The issue gathered together several excellent articles from the leaders in the ®eld demonstrating the transformation in structural biology brought about by synchrotron radiation. The importance of synchrotron radiation for structural biology is recognized by the funding agencies around the world. In the USA, NIH has increased its commitment to the synchrotron radiation sources by providing an extra injection of funds to several US facilities. In the UK, the Wellcome Trust, a large medical charity, provided ~$160M last year towards the replacement of the SRS Daresbury. The UK government had been expected to provide the remainder of the cost but, in August, French Science Minister Claude AlleAgre announced the participation of the French government in the UK's DIAMOND project (Fig. 1). He also announced the abandonment of the French project SOLEIL (Fig. 2). AlleAgre has argued that money spent on large `big science' facilities should be rerouted into research projects. The announcement by AlleAgre has angered a wide spectrum of scientists in France. Some of this anger was witnessed at the recent SRS Users Meeting where senior of®cials of the UK Ministry of Science and Technology were present. The decision to make DIAMOND the single source for the two 1069