Eighteen years ago, when Christian Chopin took over the charge of managing editor from Christian Willaime, it was with an immediate challenge: making the journal available online. It was a revolution!

Today we remain proud of our journal achievements. In 2018, 98 articles were published and the last issue of the year appeared in December, as planned. The impact factor for 2018 is not yet known but we have good reasons to be confident and believe it will be the best we ever had. We must be thankful to Christian, who fought through all these years to preserve the independence of the journal and the high-quality standard of the publication.

Throughout eighteen years of hard work, Christian shaped the journal with his personal high standards: rigour, resilience and full dedication to the community. He transmitted to the journal a credibility that makes it internationally recognised for its professionalism and scientific seriousness. During all these years the impact factor of the journal oscillated between 1.19 and 1.51. Notwithstanding, the journal preserved its strong identity. Personally, I have always been impressed by the work capacity and dedication of Christian to the journal, which remained unchanged as the years passed.

I am now taking the torch from Christian Chopin. I am committed to keep the high standard of the journal and of its evaluation system, also with an immediate challenge. Today, whether we like it or not, we are facing a new revolution with the generalization of the Open Access (OA). In 2019 the thirty-first volume of the European Journal of Mineralogy will be published. It will be a year of important transformations, as we need to prepare the journal to match the requirements of the “Plan S” for 2020.

The past and future success of our journal is the result of teamwork. The team includes all of us, the Chief Editors, the Associate Editors (special thanks to Bernardo Cesare, who just stepped down in December), but also our dedicated team of publishers, the authors and the four funding societies. I also acknowledge the financial support by the French “Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique” that has been sustaining this adventure along all these years. In my name and the name of Christian, I take the opportunity to thank them and you for the continuous support.

Schweizerbart Science Publishers would like to use this opportunity to express their deepest gratitude to Prof. Christian Chopin for his long service as Managing Editor of European Journal of Mineralogy. Over the years, it was always pleasurable to work with him, a very friendly and competent scientist and empathic human being at the same time. We are confident that the new Managing Editor Jannick Ingrin will be successful in leading the journal in the future just as Christian Chopin did in the almost 20 years past.

The Publishers

Stuttgart, February 2019