Editorial

The current issue of Journal of Neutron Research carries running papers. Today our content comprises half running papers and half proceedings of workshops. We feel that this is a good balance since advances in neutron technologies are often communicated verbally at meetings rather than in written, accessible form. This can result in information being lost. It is important to avoid this since neutron scattering is an intensity-limited technique and every last neutron must be coaxed to interact with the sample. This is why the publishers of JNR have readily accepted our proposal to scan and archive the laboratory report proceedings of all previous ICANS meetings going back to the first meeting at Argonne National Laboratory in 1977. Such an endeavour is no small task and we are grateful to David Greaves for having done it. ICANS is the excellent International Collaboration on Advanced Neutron Sources that is to have its next meeting in Oxford from 27th to 31st March 2017, the 22nd in the series. The interested reader can read and search the ICANS proceedings on the journal’s website at http://www.neutronresearch.com/procs/?o=0 and discover the reach of ICANS at http://icansxxii.iopconfs.org/home.

The survey of neutron capabilities in Europe, covering the current situation as well as looking into future prospects, is now complete and can be found on the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures) website at http://www.esfri.eu/esfri-news/neutron-scattering-facilities-europe-esfri-report-now-published. I was asked to chair the Neutron Landscape Group on behalf of ESFRI’s Physical Sciences and Engineering group that brought together ∼10 people actively involved in the field and who produced the report. It was interesting to see how the group’s views evolved and converged over the two years that it took to produce this document. There are three distinct stakeholder groups in neutron sources and these are: the source funders; the source operators; and the source users. Their responsibilities, their needs, their expectations and their ambitions are by no means congruent and yet the health of neutron scattering as a continuing productive scientific discipline requires a high degree of congruence. The forum to achieve this congruence does not exist however and decisions that nevertheless have a wide-ranging impact are often made unilaterally and less than transparently. I will not attempt to summarise the findings of the report in a limited number of words here but instead invite the reader to consult the document, hoping to have whetted the appetite of some to do so.

Colin Carlile

Editor-in-Chief