Dear Participants,

You are cordially welcome for participating in the 1st International Electronic Conference on Crystals. This is a new initiative which offers the opportunity for researchers engaged in the study of crystalline materials to present their research and exchange ideas with their colleagues. We take full advantage of the Internet, removing the need to travel and participation expenses. We hope there will be a fruitful discussion and positive criticism to all conference presentations and posters.

As this is the first conference on Crystals, sponsored by the MDPI open access journal Crystals, it will be rather general. During the last few years, many significant advances have been made on the structure determinations and theoretical understanding of crystalline or quasi-crystalline substances. This stems from advances in experimental (both diffractometric and spectroscopic) and computational techniques for research in many different areas, from pharmaceutical, to materials, to biomolecular science, to cite a few. Taking inspiration from the Section scheme of Crystals, we envision a conference organized around the following themes:

Liquid Crystals

Biomolecular Crystals

Crystal Engineering

Interactions in Crystal Structures and Crystal Engineering

Nano- and Two-Dimensional Crystals

Photonic, Phononic and Plasmonic Crystals

This is a virtual conference held at www.sciforum.net/. Sciforum.net is a platform developed and sponsored by MDPI to organize electronic conferences, and to provide our community with the technical support for hosting our digital conferences. This platform has been established in response to the high demand from our community whom might not always have the required material and human resources for travelling and participating physically in high quality scientific events.

This Crystals Conference will provide participants with the unique opportunity to disseminate among their peers, in an open forum, their knowledge and latest research findings in the field of Crystallography and immediately receive feedback from the virtual audience.

The participation is free of charge—both for authors and attendees. Accepted papers will be gathered in the Proceedings of the conference. Selected extended versions of the papers will be published in journal Crystals with a discount of 20% on the Article Processing Charge.

Prof. Dr. Alberto Girlando

Chairman of the 1st International Electronic Conference on Crystals

Alberto Girlando is a retired Professor of Chemical Physics. He is currently Research Guest at the Department of Chemistry, Life Science and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Parma, Italy. Alberto Girlando earned the Laurea degree in Chemistry, magna cum laude, from Padova University, where he started his academic career. During sabbatical leave (1979), he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Research Laboratories of San José (California). In 1987, he was appointed full Professor in Chemical Physics, and moved to Parma University. The scientific interests of Prof. Girlando have been mainly focused on the study of molecular materials characterized by special electrical and optical properties, namely, charge-transfer crystals, organic metals and superconductors, and organic semiconductors. In such studies, detailed spectroscopic measurements (polarized absorption and reflectance, Raman, and microspectro- photometric techniques) have always been associated with the development of interpretative models and quantum chemical computational methods. The electron–phonon coupling, both intra-molecular and inter-molecular, in the presence of important electron–electron interactions is the focus of the theoretical developments. On the experimental side, particular attention is devoted to the pressure- and temperature-induced phase transitions and to the characterization of ultrathin organic films grown by a variety of techniques (self-assembled, Langmuir–Blodgett, molecular beams). Prof. Girlando is author of more than 170 publications in international refereed journals, and of approximately just as many communications to scientific conferences. He is a member of the Società Chimica Italiana (SCI), of the Americal Physical Society (APS) and of the American Chemical Society (ACS). He acts as a referee for several APS and ACS journals, and has been recently acknowledged as "Outstanding Referee" of APS Physical Review B and Physical Review Letters. He is a member of the Editorial board of the MDPI journal Crystals.

Prof. Dr. Abel Moreno

Chairman of the 1st International Electronic Conference on Crystals

Institute of Chemistry, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, 04510, Mexico

Professor Moreno was awarded a B.Sc. in chemistry by the Autonomous University of Puebla (Mexico) in 1990; a Ph.D. in chemistry was awarded by the University of Granada (Spain) in 1995. Currently, he is Professor of Biological and Physical Chemistry (category "Titular C") at the Institute of Chemistry of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. He is a distinguished member of the National System of Researchers of Mexico (SNI) level 3 (the highest in the categories for Mexican scientists). He is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences and of the Mexican and American Chemical Societies. Prof. Moreno has been a visiting professor in a sabbatical year at the University of Cambridge (England, 2009) and at the University of Strasbourg (France, 2003-2004). He has further been a visiting scientist at the University of Luebeck and at the Institute of Crystal Growth (IKZ) Berlin (Germany, February 2004), at the University of Tohoku (Japan, Autumn 2003), at the Imperial College London (United Kingdom in 1999 and 2000), and at the University of California Riverside (USA, 1997). He has published more than 95 papers in prestigious international journals. He is the author of six books regarding his specialty in biological crystallogenesis, crystallochemistry, and in biomineralization processes and a further 15 book chapters. Prof. Moreno was the former President of the International Organization for Biological Crystallization from 2010 to 2012 (IOBCr). He is also a member of the international advisory board of the Commission of Crystal Growth and Characterization of Materials of the International Union of Crystallography; a member of the Mexican Society of Chemistry, Crystallography and a regular member of the American Chemical Society, New York Academy of Sciences and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Professor Moreno is an expert in protein crystallization, crystal growth methods, crystallochemistry, biomineralization, and structural research using x-ray diffraction, scanning/transmission electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy. His work and research contributions have been applied to biological chemistry and biomedical sciences. Prof. Moreno is a leading scientist in protein crystallogenesis, crystal growth, protein crystallochemistry, and biomineralization processes in Latin America.

Sessions

Submissions should be done by the authors online by registering with www.sciforum.net, and using the "New Submission" function once logged into system.

1. Scholars interested in participating with the conference can submit their abstract (about 150-300 words covering the areas of manuscripts for the proceedings issue) online on this website until 5 March 2018.
2. The Conference Committee will pre-evaluate, based on the submitted abstract, whether a contribution from the authors of the abstract will be welcome for the IECC 2018. All authors will be notified by 15 April 2018 about the acceptance of their abstract.
3. If the abstract is accepted for this conference, the author is asked to submit his/her manuscript, optionally along with a PowerPoint (only PDF) and/or video presentation of his/her paper, until the submission deadline of 20 May 2018.
4. The manuscripts and presentations will be available on IECC 2018 homepage for discussion and rating during the time of the conference 21-31 May 2018.
5. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the conference and journal Crystals will publish the proceedings of the conference as a Special Issue. After the conference, the authors are recommended to submit an extended version of the proceeding papers to the Crystals Special issue with 20% discount on the APC.

Manuscripts for the proceedings issue must have the following organization:

• Title
• Full author names
• Affiliations (including full postal address) and authors' e-mail addresses
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results and Discussion
• Conclusions
• (Acknowledgements)
• References

Manuscripts should be prepared in MS Word and should be converted to the PDF format before submission. The publication format will be PDF. There is no page limit on the length, although authors are asked to keep their papers as concise as possible.

Authors must use the Microsoft Word template to prepare their manuscript. Using the template file will substantially shorten the time to complete copy-editing and publication of accepted manuscripts. Manuscript prepared in MS Word must be converted into a single file before submission. Please do not insert any graphics (schemes, figures, etc.) into a movable frame which can superimpose the text and make the layout very difficult.

Manuscript Preparation

• Paper Format: A4 paper format, the printing area is 17.5 cm x 26.2 cm. The margins should be 1.75 cm on each side of the paper (top, bottom, left, and right sides).
• Formatting / Style: Papers should be prepared following the style of IECC 2018 template. The full titles and the cited papers must be given. Reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ], and placed before the punctuation; for example [4] or [1-3], and all the references should be listed separately and as the last section at the end of the manuscript.
• Authors List and Affiliation Format: Authors' full first and last names must be given. Abbreviated middle name can be added. For papers written by various contributors a corresponding author must be designated. The PubMed/MEDLINE format is used for affiliations: complete street address information including city, zip code, state/province, country, and email address should be added. All authors who contributed significantly to the manuscript (including writing a section) should be listed on the first page of the manuscript, below the title of the article. Other parties, who provided only minor contributions, should be listed under Acknowledgments only. A minor contribution might be a discussion with the author, reading through the draft of the manuscript, or performing English corrections.
• Figures, Schemes and Tables: Authors are encouraged to prepare figures and schemes in color. Full color graphics will be published free of charge. Figure and schemes must be numbered (Figure 1, Scheme I, Figure 2, Scheme II, etc.) and a explanatory title must be added. Tables should be inserted into the main text, and numbers and titles for all tables supplied. All table columns should have an explanatory heading. Please supply legends for all figures, schemes and tables. The legends should be prepared as a separate paragraph of the main text and placed in the main text before a table, a figure or a scheme.

For further inquiries please contact the Conference Secretariat.

Authors are also encouraged to submit video presentations. The video will be uploaded to Youtube, as well as onto Sciforum. The video should be no longer than 20 minutes and be prepared with the following formats,

• .MOV
• .MPEG4
• .MP4
• .AVI
• .WMV
• .MPEGPS
• .FLV

The video should be submitted via email before 20 May 2018.

It is the authors' responsibility to identify and declare any personal circumstances or interests that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of clinical research. If there is no conflict, please state here "The authors declare no conflict of interest." This should be conveyed in a separate "Conflict of Interest" statement preceding the "Acknowledgments" and "References" sections at the end of the manuscript. Financial support for the study must be fully disclosed under "Acknowledgments" section. It is the authors' responsibility to identify and declare any personal circumstances or interests that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of clinical research. If there is no conflict, please state here "The authors declare no conflict of interest." This should be conveyed in a separate "Conflict of Interest" statement preceding the "Acknowledgments" and "References" sections at the end of the manuscript. Financial support for the study must be fully disclosed under "Acknowledgments" section.

MDPI AG, the publisher of the Sciforum.net platform, is an open access publisher. We believe that authors should retain the copyright to their scholarly works. Hence, by submitting a Communication paper to this conference, you retain the copyright of your paper, but you grant MDPI AG the non-exclusive right to publish this paper online on the Sciforum.net platform. This means you can easily submit your paper to any scientific journal at a later stage and transfer the copyright to its publisher (if required by that publisher).