This open-access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/legalcode, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are cited. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online is the IUCr's highly popular open-access structural journal. It provides a simple and easily accessible publication mechanism for the growing number of inorganic, metal-organic and organic crystal structure determinations. The electronic submission, validation, refereeing and publication facilities of the journal ensure very rapid and high-quality publication, whilst key indicators and validation reports provide measures of structural reliability. The journal publishes over 4000 structures per year. The average publication time is less than one month