Introduction

Dear Readers,

It is time to look back at this past year, celebrate our achievements, and thank all of the many people who made these achievements possible. 2012 was a great year for IMWA and this journal. Our membership is now at an all-time high (more than 700 individuals), and this journal has more subscribers than ever before. Moreover, during the past year, more manuscripts (79) were submitted for consideration and more papers (34) were published. All of this would not have been possible without a great team effort.

First, I would like to thank our associate editors, Leslie Batty, Charlotte Braungardt, Chuck Cravotta, Ted Eary, Chris Moran, Lucas Moore, Len Murray, and Alex Waterhouse. Those of you who have submitted manuscripts and seen them improved through the editing and reviewing process know that this journal would not be possible without them. Because of other responsibilities that they have taken on, Ted has recently stepped down and Lesley is about to do the same, as soon as she finishes the two manuscripts in her queue. That means that we can use at least one new associate editor; if you are a native English speaker and are interested in learning more about this opportunity, please send me an e-mail.

I also want to thank Christian Wolkersdorfer, who in addition to serving as IMWA’s General Secretary, serves as our managing editor and graphics guru, and our International Editorial Board: Lena Alakangas, David Blowes, Rosa Cidu, Edgardo Donati, Rafael Fernández-Rubio, Kurt Friese, Rachid Hakkou, Mathew McGann, Abhay Sony, Changshen Wang, and Ian Watson. I also want to thank the folks who translate our abstracts. Now those of you who have only looked at our journal when it reaches your desk are probably not aware of it, but our on-line version has the abstract of each paper carefully translated into Chinese (by Changshen Wang), Spanish (by Edgardo Donati), and German (by a committee: Jörn Geletneky, Michael Paul, Walter Pohl, Martin Schultze, Kai Silabetschky, and Wilfried Uhlmann). This helps some of our readers who struggle with English a little to decide which papers they should focus their efforts on; they (and we) appreciate their efforts. All of you who subscribe to this journal can access the on-line version for free; in addition to the abstract translations, you get to see the papers many months earlier than they appear in print and additional figures, which are referred to as supplemental figures in the text.

We are also indebted to our stalwart reviewers of this past year: Carolina Abreu, Michael Ali, Ahmad Aryafar, Michel Aubertin, Paula Avila, Mattias Bäckström, Gerry Baker, Adriano Bandeira, Astrid Barkleit, Andrew Barnes, Keith Berry, Robert Borden, Charlotte Braungardt, Adrian Brown, Richard Bush, Devin Castendyk, Francisco Castrillón-Muñoz, Lionel Catalan, Venkata Chada, Mohamed Chiban, Peter Cinotto, Wilhelm Coldewey, Richard Connelly, Maria Costa, Charles Cravotta III, Dave Craw, Luiz de Andrade Lima, Dimitris Dimitrakopoulos, Craig Divine, Donglin Dong, Ted Eary, Ben Faulkner, Helga Ferket, Andrew Fletcher, Franco Frau, Alison Frostick, Catherin Gandy, Gwendelyn Geidel, Joern Geletneky, Walter Geller, Jennifer Geroni, Gavin Gillmore, David Gold, Cleber Gomes, Wang Guangcai, Rachid Hakkou, John Harman, Paul Howe, Ian Hutchison, Yaomin Jin, Ray Johnson, Candace Kairies Beatty, Stefan Karlsson, Tania Kennedy, J. Ketchum, Ben Klinck, Roger Lee, Peiyue Li, Helena Lind, Romy Matthies, Clint McCullough, Jean Menezes, Gary Meyer, Martin Mkandawire, Kevin Morin, Kevin Myers, Leif Nelson, Ronald Neufeld, Bjorn Ohlander, Nora Hilda Paños, Nadine Piatak, Benoît Plante, Walter Pohl, Xunchi Pu, Sierra Rayne, Guy Riefler, Ramon Rodriguez, Prafulla Sahoo, Javier Sánchez España, William Schafer, Petra Schneider, Martin Schultze, John Senko, Shikha Sharma, A. S. Sheoran, Douglas Sims, Abhay Singh, Bronislaw Smolski, Frank Stapelfeldt, Gideon Steyl, William Strosnider, Zoltan Szabo, Brent Usher, Teresa Valente, Mark Vancook, Eleni Vassiliou, Danie Vermeulen, Katherine Walton-Day, George Watzlaf, Christoph Weidner, Richard Wilkin, David Williams, Ward Wilson, Thomas Wohlford, Magdalena Worsa-Kozak, Kendra Zamzow, Guosheng Zhan, and Paul Ziemkiewicz. Of these, the most stalwart this past year was Gideon Steyl, who reviewed four papers. Sorry about that Gideon; we try to spread the workload and not overwork any of our reviewers, but apparently you were asked four times this year and never said no—thank you!

If you do not see your name on this list, it may mean that you never went to our journal web site (http://www.editorialmanager.com/mwen) and registered as a reviewer, or that if you did so, you did not take the extra minute to identify your areas of expertise; we try to only send manuscripts to reviewers that match their interests, but for us to do that, you must tell us what type of papers you would like to see.

I also want to thank the Springer staff, especially the editorial office assistants with whom I and the other editors closely work. For most of 2012, that was Sithara Shenoy, who did an excellent job for us for at least 2 years. But I guess we wore her out; she stepped down in October, and Jeyashree Ramamoorthy stepped into the gap without missing a beat, which considering all of the requests for assistance we generate, was fairly remarkable.

Finally, we thank all of the authors, without which this journal would of course not be possible, and you, our dedicated, faithful readers, without which it would not be worth publishing. I hope that our journal will be at least as interesting to you in 2013 as it was this past year and I sincerely welcome your feedback.

Bob Kleinmann

Editor-in-Chief

editor@MWEN.info