After 10 years as co-Chief Editor, Georges Beaudoin will step down at the end of 2022. During Georges’ tenure, Mineralium Deposita has continued to grow as the top journal for research on mineral deposits. He is followed by Karen Kelley, a long-standing member of the Editorial Board with a broad expertise on all kinds of hydrothermal ore deposits. The North America office moves from Québec, Canada, to Denver, USA.

The editorial change is a welcome occasion to have a look at the current state of performance of the journal. We currently receive about 350 manuscripts per year, of which we accept about 20% for publication. This translates into about 70 papers equal to approximately 1500 print pages. Forty-five percent of all manuscript submissions are from China, while submissions from any other country represents ≤ 5%. Thirty percent of all accepted manuscrips are from China, a figure similar to many other science journals, reflecting the enormous research capacity and gowing quality of geoscience in China. Once a manuscript is accepted, production turnaround time up to the online publication is about 20 days only. However, the peer review process takes about 250 days on average, with a large variation range. This figure is unsatisfactory, but difficult to improve as there is a certain fatigue noted with expert referees, and part of the burden rests on the authors to timely submit revisions.

The journal impact factor (IF) has constantly grown over the last 20 years and is currently at 5.21 (IF 2021), ahead of our nearest competitors (Fig. 1). The IF of mineral deposit journals was slowly rising until circa 2013, when the IF of all three major mineral deposit journals started to rise more rapidly than that of other journals, such as Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Fig. 1). A significant part of our IF is due to citations in Ore Geology Reviews (~ 28% in 2021), and the increase in number of articles in that journal since circa 2013 roughly parallels the steep increase of our IF (Fig. 2). In addition, there has been a number of new journals, mostly with online publication (e.g., Minerals in 2014), that have increased the number of papers in the field and which cite the research reported in Mineralium Deposita, contributing to the raise of the journal’s IF.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The 2-year impact factor (IF) for Mineralium Deposita (MD), Economic Geology (EG), Ore Geology Reviews (OGR), and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (GCA) (data from Clarivate)

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Number of citable items and citations used to calculate the 2-year impact factor for Mineralium Deposita (MD), Economic Geology (EG), and Ore Geology Reviews (OGR) (data from Clarivate)

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Our own spectrum of journals cited in Mineralium Deposita in 2021 is relatively balanced with papers from Economic Geology (10%), Ore Geology Reviews (6%), Mineralium Deposita (5%), Geochimica et Cosmichimica Acta (5%), Chemical Geology (4%), Lithos (3%), Earth and Planetary Science Letters (3%), and Geology (2%).

There is a general trend toward Open Access publishing. SpringerNature opts for Transformative Agreements where governmental or other research institutions cover the publication fees for their researchers. Such agreements exist for countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Qatar, and the UK) and for some university systems (MIT, University of California), and their number is ever increasing. If the communicating authors are from these countries/institutions, their paper is granted Open Access with no individual author fees. In other countries, the agreement gives a reduction on the Open Access publication fee (e.g., − 20% in Canada).

Mineralium Deposita is part of the 3000 + family of SpringerNature journals, and we benefit from a very effective publishing and distribution system. There are more than 7000 institutions globally where the journal is available via a variety of online deals, and there were almost 250,000 downloads of articles of Mineralium Deposita last year, a high number indicating wide interest in the journal’s content. We are confident that the journal is on the right track for continued leadership in the science of mineral deposits. This, of course, is a tribute to the scientists that have submitted their top research results to the journal.