Dear Readers,

We have already received nearly almost as many manuscripts as we received all of last year, so it is clear that the journal’s popularity continues to grow. Our Journal Impact Factor, which is up to 1.206, supports this. However, membership in IMWA, which had been growing exponentially, appears to have plateaued. Given that one of the benefits of membership is a subscription to this journal, and that the cost of membership (only 50 Euros a year, and half of that for students) is much less than the cost of subscribing to the journal without joining IMWA, all I can figure is that we are getting manuscript submissions from authors who haven’t joined and presumably therefore, have not read all of the papers previously published in the journal (all of which are of course available on-line to our members). Perhaps that also explains why more and more papers are being rejected by our reviewers, who can be quite critical of authors who don’t make the effort of reading previous work done outside of their country—members can browse through the contents of older IMWA journals at http://www.imwa.info/content.html and easily read relevant papers that have already appeared in “Mine Water and the Environment”. I have asked Christian to send a letter to all of our authors, encouraging them to join, and I encourage all of you to do what you can to promote IMWA membership and the journal to your peers and co-workers.

In the last issue, I had the pleasure of announcing that the winners of the best paper published in this journal last year (2014) were: Ihssan Dawood and Michel Aubertin, for their paper: Effect of Dense Material Layers on Unsaturated Water Flow Inside a Large Waste Rock Pile—A Numerical Investigation, pp 24–38 (published in the March issue). However, a line of that announcement somehow got clipped during printing, so Ihssan did not get the credit he was due. My apologies! I believe the award is now sitting in his office, so perhaps that makes up for it.

Finally, this issue contains papers from five of all of the six continents that contains IMWA members. I confess that I was tempted to move one of the papers from Australia ahead of its place in the queue so I could make the issue ‘complete’, but stuck to my rule of using the date of submission as the primary deciding factor on which paper gets printed next. Of course, you do not have to wait for the printed version of the journal to read our papers, which are published electronically many months earlier than it appears in hard copy, since you, as IMWA members, can download and read all of those papers whenever you wish. That includes all of the papers in our next issue, which will be a special issue focused on mine water research in New Zealand.

figure a

Bob Kleinmann Editor-in-Chief editor@MWEN.info