Celebrating the Past, Looking to the Future

It is with great excitement that we look forward to the New Year at Acta Crystallographica Section A: Foundations and Advances. As the International Year of Crystallography draws to a close, we were delighted to read in the Nature that crystallography was well represented. We were even more excited to find that a full seven of the top 100 articles were published in IUCr journals, and of these, four were in Acta A (in the order in which they appear in the list): (1) A short history of SHELX by G. (2) Revised effective ionic radii and systematic studies of interatomic distances in halides and chalcogenides by R. (4) Improved methods for building protein models in electron density maps and the location of errors in these models by T. The 2008 paper by George Sheldrick is No. 13 on the top 100 list and is the highest-ranked paper published in the past two decades. As of the end of 2014, it has had over 39 000 citations. This speaks to the enduring scientific (and societal) impact of crystallography even into the 21st century, and to the important place that Acta A has in this rich and ongoing history. We are obviously delighted that in this January 2015 edition of Acta A we publish, as one of our three Advances papers, Professor Sheldrick's paper describing SHELXT, a new weapon in the crystallographer's arsenal and a new member of the SHELX suite of programs [Sheldrick, G. M. (2015). Acta Cryst. A71, 3–8]. We believe that, moving forward, the contributions of crystallographers (and nano-crystal-lographers and non-crystalline crystallographers) will continue to be pivotal and have broad scientific reach, and we believe that Acta A's wonderful tradition and position as the main foundational journal for advances in structure science will be maintained. We would like to thank our editorial board, reviewers and authors for their hard work in 2014, the more so because striving for the highest standards, as we are, takes more care and application on everyone's part. We strongly believe that the hard work is worth it and that Acta A will go from strength to strength in 2015. The first Advances paper, Magnetic pair distribution function analysis of local magnetic correlations In this January 2015 edition of the journal we have three Advances papers: SHELXT – Integrated space-group and crystal-structure determination by G. M.