Section 5.7.2.7. Submission and review

When an author has previewed and checked the contents of the CIF and has made the changes suggested by a careful study of the preprint and the checkcif report, the article may finally be submitted to Acta Cryst. C or E by file upload over the web. Other files completing or supporting the submission are also transferred to the editorial office at this time. These include structure-factor or powder profile listings for each structure, figures and chemical diagrams, and sometimes other supplementary documents. Structure-factor listings are supplied in CIF format. Figures may be in one of a number of standard graphics file formats, and at the moment have to be uploaded as separate files. Future extensions to CIF, perhaps following the imgCIF approach, may allow all the items needed to submit an article, including figures, to be prepared as a single file.

When all the files have arrived at the editorial office, a review document is generated that can be sent to the referees. This document contains: the text and tables of the article that will appear in the final publication, but laid out in a more open style suitable for annotation by hand; tables of atomic positions and geometry (containing all the data in the CIF, not just the subset that has been selected for displaying in the published article); certain fields from the CIF that are not normally printed but which may contain details of the way in which the experiment was carried out (these fields might have been completed manually or by the software controlling the experiment); the figures and other supplementary documents; and a print-out of the report from a final checkcif cycle, including a displacement-ellipsoid plot of the molecule in a minimal-overlap least-squares plane view. This composite document provides the information that a referee will typically want to consider in a compact and convenient form. Because the CIF is so highly structured, producing this review document is in most cases entirely automatic. The complete CIF as submitted by the author and the experimental data are also made available to the reviewer.

If revisions are requested, authors may upload modified files. The generation of revised versions of an article is also largely automatic.