Dear Readers

Dear Readers,

Thanks to all of you who responded to our e-mail last year asking if you wished to become an associate editor or a reviewer. It was great to see such a high level of interest in helping us to keep pace with the ever-increasing number of submissions. We selected about a dozen new provisional associate editors and they are getting a chance now to see if they are comfortable with the work and if they enjoy the activity. Expect to see the names of these new associate editors on this journal’s inside front cover later this year. We will contact others who expressed interest when editorial spots become available.

As you may have noticed, with the aid of our new associate editors and reviewers, our journal has expanded once again! This issue includes 18 papers, and Springer has already authorized the publication of that many papers in the rest of the issues to be published this year. We have also changed how we are posting out table of contents on the journal’s cover. As the number of papers in each issue kept increasing, the list of those papers became almost impossible to read, at least to my aging eyes. So, with this issue, we are starting to list the papers on the front cover and continuing the list on the back cover, allowing us to significantly increase the font size. This should make it easier to quickly spot the papers you want to read.

Of course, you can easily access all of our papers on-line, many months before they appear in print, if you are a current member of IMWA. More information can be found at http://www.IMWA.info/associationcodes, but the key is that you need to first register with Springer and thereafter type in your IMWA Association Code to get free access to all of these papers. You will receive your individual 2018 IMWA Association Code by e-mail shortly after you pay your 2018 dues, which, by the way, is still only 60 Euros/year and only 30 Euros/year for students (and you can pay via Paypal in USD or Euros). If you feel that this is a great deal (as I do), please renew your membership and encourage your peers and co-workers to join IMWA; or have your company become a corporate member so that you and your coworkers can all enjoy access to past and pending journal articles.

We are preparing two special issues that you should know about. The first has been organized by Professor Peiyue Li and spans a broad range of mine water research in China. This may surprise some of you, but the research there involves more than just predicting and preventing water inrush disasters, as important as that topic obviously is. By the time you read this, all of the papers for that special issue will be published on-line and we hope to print them in our June issue, if paper-processing technicalities allow.

We also have begun accepting manuscript submissions for a special issue on pit lakes. Mark Lund (m.lund@ecu.edu.au) and Melanie Blanchette (m.blanchette@ecu.edu.au) are guest editors for that special issue; please contact them if you have any questions. And if you are unsure whether your topic is suitable for the special issue, just send them a short abstract and ask. But, anticipating a question that you might have if you previously published papers on that topic in our IMWA 2017 or have submitted such a paper for our 2018 conference proceedings, yes it is always possible to submit such papers for this journal, but do not simply use copy and paste; a journal submission cannot be a partial clone of a previously published paper. The journal submission should be a substantially updated or expanded version of the conference paper, with additional results and a more thorough discussion of the results, and you must properly cite the prior conference publication. Before submission, please refer to http://www.IMWA.info/notes-for-contributors.html, as paper formatting requirements for the journal are different from conference proceedings.

Our list of potential reviewers has expanded, as a response to the e-mailed request, though some of the new reviewers may not have yet had a paper sent their way. Without all of your help, we could not maintain our high standards. All of the editors and the authors truly appreciate your efforts. With this thought in mind, we would like to publicly thank all 206 of you who reviewed papers in 2017.

First, let’s especially recognize our top 25 reviewers, led by Mohammad Valipour, who reviewed the most papers; he reviewed 16 manuscripts in 2017! Steven Meyerhoff reviewed 12, in addition to serving as an associate editor, while Donglin Dong reviewed 11 manuscripts. Cleber Gomes reviewed eight, Imtiaz Ahmad and Wei Qiao both reviewed seven, and Li Bo, Martin Mkandawire, and Miran Veselic each reviewed six. Andrew Johnstone, Longging Shi, Elif Agartan, Kai-Uwe Ulrich, Kevin Myers, Walter Pohl, Hao Wang, and Jianhua Wu each reviewed five manuscripts and Amy Hudson, Ahmet Osmanlioglu, Carolina Abreu, Fangpeng Cui, Gangwei Fan, Gideon Steyl (another of our associate editors), Julien Declercq, and John Waterhouse each reviewed four papers.

Farshad Alijani, Jordi Guimera, Mark Williamson, Martin Schultze, Margarete Kalin, Magdalena Balintova, Malibongwe Manono, Natalia Orekhova, Gerry Baker, Broder Merkel, Rosa Cidu, M. Farhad Howladar, Weiqun Liu, Thomas Lachmar, Raymond Johnson, Shane O’Neill, Huiyong Yin, and Qing Yu each reviewed three papers, while Wanfang Zhou, Ke Xu, Radwan Al-Weshah, Mugera Gitari, Xunchi Pu, John Senko, Serge Brouyère, Sevgi Demirel, Bin Shi, Shuyun Zhu, Vladimir Matichenkov, Maria Costa, David Brett, David Richard Jones, Catherine Gandy, Carl Williams, Denise Levitan, Deepesh Machiwal, Douglas B. Sims, Souhail Al-Abed, Adam Jarvis, Chunhu Zhao, Xiaonong Hu, Anna Bogush, Alison Sinclair, Ben B. Faulkner, Bernadette Azzie, Biswaranjan Dhal, Mattias Bäckström, Nada Rapantova, Linda Figueroa, Lixiang Lin, Małgorzata Ciosmak, Jim Fricke, Jan Ilavsky, Elaine Goetz, Dechao Hu, Gang Lin, Peiyue Li, and Krishna Rao all reviewed two manuscripts this past year.

Finally, Katherine Walton-Day, Lesley Batty, Lars Lovgren, Leonardo Bissacot, Lucila Lantschner, J.X. Yang, Xiaozhen Jiang, Jianting (Julian) Zhu, Krzysztof Polak, Karsten Liber, Muharrem Kemal Ozfirat, Robert M. Hughes, Ingar Walder, Margarida Antunes, Jacek Szczepinski, Greg Maddocks, Győző Jordán, Rachid Hakkou, Howard Hall, Jean Carlo S.S. Menezes, Jean-François Blais, Ming JI, Juliana Galhardi, Massimo Gasparon, Mariusz Rzętała, Janos Geiger, Matt Pierce, Lucie Coudert, Melanie L. Blanchette, Liangping Li, Manish Jain, Manny Mathuthu, Manuel Olias, Eric Marchand, Yaneth Vasquez, Peter Woods, Kannan Pakshirajan, Paul Baudron, Petra Schneider, Paulo Favas, Mehmet Ekmekci, Michael Gabora, Mike Morse, Michael Sieczkowski, Michael Sweetenham, Barbara Butler, Bisrat Yibas, Angus Rowland, Anita Parbhakar-Fox, Charlotte Braungardt, Wei Chen, Robert Hedin, Beatriz Firpo, Alejandro Carrillo Chavez, Verma Amit, Andres Navarro, Ajit Pratap Singh, Alan Puhalovich, Arden Davis, Alex Riley, A.S. Sheoran, Atta Rasool, Andrew Wood, Ben Heinrich, Chunlu Jiang, Ashley Jones, Adrian Brown, Adimalla Narsimha, Alex Sutton, Bably Prasad, Devin Casstendyk, Douglas Hambley, Ratnakar Dhakate, Daniele Pedretti, Kevin Morin, Carmen Neculita, Candace Kairies-Beatty, Dale Rucker, Shanghai Du, Eduardo Balladares, Davidson Egirani, Elena Khayrulina, Eric Rosa, Eleanora Robbins, Ryszard Staniszewski, Vojtech Ettler, David Dettrick, Dawn S. Kaback, Oluranti Agboola, Gwendelyn Geidel, Eric Perry, Godfrey Madzivire, Scott Effner, Florian Werner, Xuesheng Liu, Wenping Li, Tobias Roetting, Vinod Kumar Gupta, Vyacheslav Palchik, Vinayakam Jothiprakash, Will Mayes, Walter Geller, Rebecca Bartlett, RB Golekar, Ronald Breitmeyer, Richard Connelly, Rob van Hille, Ron Mullennex, Shouqiang Liu, Frank Stapelfeldt, Stefan Karlsson, Stephanie Somot, Yajun Sun, Ted Eary, Thomas Genty, R. K. Tiwary, Tania Kennedy, Xiangyun Hu, Shangxian Yin, Yonglian Sun, J.X. Zhang, Zaibin Liu, and Yifan Zeng all reviewed one paper.

Thank you, one and all! If you would like to see your name on this list, please go to our journal’s web site (http://www.editorialmanager.com/mwen) to make sure that you are registered as a reviewer, that your e-mail address is correct, and that your areas of expertise are clearly identified, as we generally use those to select our reviewers. This enables us to select manuscripts for you to review that you may find interesting. If your interests are described and you were somehow not asked to review a paper in 2017, just send me an e-mail and we will make sure that you receive the opportunity to help review papers in 2018.

Finally, in addition to our reviewers, I also want to thank our authors, without which there would be no journal, and you, our dedicated readers, without whom there would be no reason for this journal to exist. I, and the rest of the editorial team, are grateful for your interest and support of this journal and IMWA. We look forward to seeing many of you in a few months in South Africa. If you, like us, are interested in working this conference into your vacation plans, I suggest you check the conference site (http://www.IMWA2018.info) for information on the accompanying persons’ tours and other activities to consider doing in South Africa.

Best Regards,

Bob Kleinmann, Editor-in-chief.