Dear Reader,

As you may have already noticed, this issue is our thickest yet since we started our journal in 1982! Since we have two special issues coming out in 2020, I was concerned that our backlog, which has been shrinking nicely, would start to increase again. So I raised my concern about this to our publisher Springer Nature and they agreed to allow us to publish up to 88 papers this year, which is eight more than our agreement. They know, as I do, that authors do not like to wait any longer than necessary to see their papers in print. And having to wait six months or more after it is published on-line for it to appear in print, as used to be common for us, is undesirable.

Next, I want to thank two of our associate editors who have gotten too busy with other duties to continue donating time to this journal. Martin Schultze and Devin Sapsford have stepped down as associate editors. We truly thank them for the time they have so generously provided.

Finally, you will see an erratum printed in this issue, reporting errors in one of our published papers. Like most errata, this was caused by authors who failed to scrupulously look over the author’s proof copy and approved it with the errors in it. This is a common mistake and I must confess that my very first published paper contained such an error that I failed to catch at the author’s proof stage. In fact, I did not see it even after it was published; it was almost two years after it was published that someone came up to me at a conference and asked if I knew that one of the chemical equations in my paper was unbalanced. I do not know if others had seen the error in the equation and were too polite to tell me about it, but it was clearly too long after it was published to bother publishing an erratum.

Now that typographical error in my equation was almost undoubted my error, which means that the error went through the review process as well. The error being reported in the erratum is similar in nature; it was not introduced in the printing process. Nonetheless, it could and should have been caught and corrected before being published on-line. And once it is published on-line, because of the nature of the DOI concept, the only available option is an erratum with a new DOI, which only reports the error but cannot really correct the original paper, since there is no easy way to inform all of those individuals who read the paper that there was an error in it. Yes, if they are faithful readers of this journal they will see the published errata and make the correction in their copy of the published paper, but most of our readers look through the table of contents for the papers that interest them and just skip over everything else, including this column and, of course, anything labelled erratum. Luckily, due to CrossRef and DOIs, it is much easier nowadays to keep track of errata as the link to an erratum can be published online near the original paper.

So, please take this as reminder to all of you who prepare papers for journals and those of you who review papers. As a reviewer, look for errors in equations, units, figures and tables. You do not have to worry about correcting the English—that is my job—but I don’t have the time (or the ability) to check all the papers for mathematical errors. And authors, when you get the proof copy, please look it over very carefully. Assume that there is likely an error and try to find it. It will likely be an error that was in the original manuscript. But even if it was introduced during the editing process or when the paper was electronically typeset, you have one last chance to find and correct it; please do so!

We look forward to seeing many of you next month at IMWA’s annual meeting, which is being held in Perm, Russia. It is not too late to register. Please go to https://www.IMWA2019.info for information on doing so.

Best Regards,

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Bob Kleinmann, PhD; Editor-in-Chief,

editor@MWEN.info

P.S.: We often get asked how to find older IMWA papers. Quite simple, you either visit https://www.IMWA.info/content.html or you use your preferred search engine and type in “site:imwa.info/docs filetype:pdf” for past proceeding’s papers or “site:imwa.info/bibliographie filetype:pdf” for IMWA Journal papers published between 1982 and 1990 before your search terms. If, for example, you want to get all IMWA proceeding’s papers between 1982 and 2018 about passive mine water treatment, you might want to search for “site:imwa.info/docs filetype:pdf passive treatment,” which results in 550 documents. Papers published in “Mine Water and the Environment” can be searched on the Springer Nature web page: https://www.springer.com/10230.