Two special journal issues on FEL research have been organised by our laboratory and were published simultaneously on 1 August 2016.

The special collection in Nature’s Scientific Data, entitled “Structural biology applications of X-ray lasers” contains a commentary and six papers that examine data generated at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The experiments describe structural studies of nanocrystals, single virus particles, living cells and cell organelles. All experimental datasets in the collection are openly available to the scientific community at the Coherent X-ray Imaging Data Bank (CXIDB).

The Journal of Applied Crystallography published a related collection of papers about software for free-electron laser experiments in a special virtual issue titled “CCP-FEL: a collection of computer programs for FEL research”. The introductory article and 16 papers discuss tools such as simulation of experiments, online monitoring of data collection, selection of hits, diagnostics of data quality, data management, and data analysis and structure determination for nanocrystallography and also for single-particle diffractive imaging.