Introduction

Dear Readers,

The past few months have been an exciting time for IMWA. First, with the withdrawal of Wales, the Executive Committee had to make a decision on where to hold our 2013 meeting. Our president (Adrian Brown) and treasurer (Lee Atkinson) have decided to take personal responsibility and to organize/host it in the Denver area where they live and work. As I write this, they have joined forces with Linda Figueroa from the Colorado School of Mines to organize next year’s IMWA conference in Golden, Colorado, in mid-August. As anyone who has ever organized a conference knows, it is difficult to organize a conference in 12 months but these folks are determined to make it work! Hopefully, by the time you read this, you will have already started writing your abstract; if not, get to work! Please, in addition, do what you can to help these folks to recruit papers, sponsors, etc. And I recommend that you do what I always do and build a small vacation around the IMWA conference; August should be a great time to be up in the Rocky Mountains!

IMWA has grown and is still growing and the Executive Council has decided to take some steps to make this a more professional organization. The alternatives were to artificially limit our membership (never seriously considered), to watch our progress be stymied by our self-imposed bureaucratic limitations, or to take some steps to become more professional. Unfortunately, the last option requires increasing our dues a bit, but we all knew that our low membership/subscription rate couldn’t last forever; it was only possible because of the generous contributions of unpaid volunteers who have been gradually asked to do more and more. Ours became a model that could not be supported over time. You should have received an electronic ballot from Christian asking you to vote on these issues. If you have not yet voted, please do so as the ballot will not be official until a majority of our membership votes!

Finally, I wanted to let you know that the Associate Editors and I have decided to be a little more selective with respect to the papers that we consider for publication in this journal, with an increased emphasis on relevance to mine water issues. For example, in the past, we have published laboratory studies in which dissolved metals that sometimes appear in mine water were removed by a potential treatment method, even though such studies were far removed from potential real world mine water applications. However, the number of papers being submitted for publication continues to increase, so we have decided to become more topically selective, and to retain our mine water focus. This may adversely impact some of our university researchers but we felt that potential relevance to our readers had to be a more important consideration. Papers that have already been reviewed will not be subject to this new standard, so you may still see a few more of these purely academic papers in this journal, but we all felt that we had started drifting too far in that direction and had to adjust our focus. I do not want to imply that we will no longer publish academic research—far from it—but the research has to have been done with real or simulated mine water. I am certain that some of you will have strong feelings with respect to this decision; please let me know by, e-mail, what you think about it.

We look forward to seeing you in Australia in October and in Golden, Colorado next year!

Bob Kleinmann, Editor-in-Chief