The year 2007 will mark the beginning of a new era for the EJM, through the fortuitous coincidence of several major events.
EJM joined the GeoScienceWorld aggregate (GSW) last summer, according to a decision made by the councils of the four owner societies. Within a few weeks, the EJM will be available online on the GSW site (http://eurjmin.geoscienceworld.org/), along with over 30 journals of other learned societies active in the Earth sciences, including all the major Mineralogy-related journals. This joining of forces is clearly a political decision. The creation of GSW highlights the central publisher role that the learned societies play in Earth sciences; by establishing in a unified effort a single bundle of Earth science journals with outstanding cross-linking and search facilities, the learned societies demonstrate that they can offer a viable alternative to the big private publishing houses that are strangulating our libraries.
The second event was announced in the last issue by Michèle Canaple herself (Eur. J. Mineral., 18, 671). Our editorial secretary will retire in a few weeks, after eighteen years of devoted service to the journal, its authors and readers. Eighteen years of the never-ending round of copy editing, proof-reading and blue-print checking; eighteen years of strict adherence to the publication schedule, this in spite of late author corrections, late manuscripts (those damned special issues, in which the whole convoy has to wait for the slowest ship), and a managing editor lost in dreams... Many thanks to you, Michèle, who has been educating us, authors and editors, for a generation. Indeed, in an earlier life, you also cared in the same way for one of the ancestors of the EJM, the Bulletin de Minéralogie, for which you stepped in together with Christian Willaime, starting from scratch. Like him, you have witnessed and accompanied the turn from, literally, lead-font time to electronic publishing. This is also the opportunity to acknowledge the long-standing support of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which provided your position.
As a first consequence, the editorial office of the journal will move to the Laboratoire de Géologie at Ecole normale supérieure, Paris. The departure of Michèle Canaple will also initiate a complete reconsideration of our production scheme, which was largely inherited from the merger of our national journals (did you ever notice that articles prepared in France or in Germany coexisted within each single issue of the journal?). The details of the new production scheme are still being fine-tuned in discussions between the societies and our faithful publisher, Schweizerbart, but I suppose that most changes will remain unnoticed by most readers. However, authors should soon enjoy the possibility of having their articles posted online before publication, soon after the proofs are corrected. From now on, deposited material will also be made available on gsw website. These new advantages will come in addition to the ever-decreasing publication time, now established well below one year (provided author revisions are made promptly!), and to an increasing impact factor (1.238 in 2005, according to ISI). An additional, unrelated change should be most appreciated by the members of the owner societies: the validation and control of their access to the online version of EJM will now proceed directly through Schweizerbart rather than through Ingenta, resulting in a much simpler procedure.
We thank associate editor Marino Maggetti, who stepped down after many years of active service, and we welcome on the editorial board Martine Buatier, Francisca Martinez Ruiz, Elisabetta Rampone, Rob Ellam, Lutz Nasdala and Ulrich Schüssler. This is the opportunity to recall, as attentive readers will have noticed on the front cover, that the EJM is open to mineralogical results in the broadest sense, evidently including petrology and ore deposits, but also more recent fields like environmental geochemistry and archaeometry, to name just a few.
This diversity is reflected in this issue and the several thematic sets of papers to appear in the EJM in 2007, namely “Mineral surface reactivity” in issue no. 3, “Experimental Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry, EMPG XI” and a special issue devoted to the formation, occurrence and properties of that gem of gems, diamond, later in the year.
Finally, we would like to thank the referees (Eur. J. Mineral., 18, 855) and the members of the editorial board of the EJM, who unselfishly offer their time for the benefit of the scientific community – rather than of shareholders. It is in this manner, supporting learned-society journals, that we can remain independent scientists.
