Editorial

The year 2014 has seen new changes in the editorial board of the European Journal of Mineralogy (EJM), with Carlos Rodríguez Navarro taking over Manuel Prieto’s position as chief editor on behalf of the Spanish Mineralogical Society. We welcome Carlos on board and wish him all the best, and we thank Manolo for his dedication, the time and service offered, and for organizing the special issue ‘Biomineralization and biomimetic materials’, co-edited with Alejandro Rodríguez Navarro and Wolfgang Schmahl. There has also been much renewal among the associate editors, with Kenneth Livi departing after a very long time of service—many thanks to you, Ken—and many new-comers: Etienne Balan, Bernardo Cesare and Edward Grew stepped in during 2014, along with Lourdes Fernández Díaz, Monika Koch-Müller, Bénédicte Menez, Andrew Christy, Nobuyoshi Miyajima and Alberto Perez Huerta who are joining us this year. The new board has a strong flavour of biomineralogy and, geographically speaking, more closely reflects the world-wide impact of the EJM, now with a number of editors in America and Australia. The recent move of chief editor Reto Gieré to the University of Pennsylvania follows in this same direction.

One year after its implementation, the Editorial Manager system for the online handling of manuscripts fulfills all expectations; both authors and editors appreciate the increased flexibility. The sole link to submit and track your EJM papers is now http://www.editorialmanager.com/ejm/. An additional benefit of this decision is the streamlining of the production of first proofs soon after acceptance. Combined with the now almost immediate posting of uncorrected proofs on both the Ingenta and GeoScienceWorld websites of the journal—as ‘Fast Track’ and ‘Online First’ papers, respectively—this ensures maximum and early exposure to your work. Although unrelated to these recent changes, the recent increase of the EJM’s ISI Impact Factor to an unprecedented value of 1.506 reflects a positive evolution, a reward both for authors and for the efforts of the editorial board.

There is some other good news. For the papers published in volume 26 (2014), the average time between submission and online publication has decreased to less than 7 months, several papers achieving publication within 2 or 3 months. In spite of the delays in print publication of the last issues of 2013, the EJM was back to a regular schedule in 2014 and the average submission to print-publication time for volume 26 was less than 11 months. We should also point out that we are granting a promotional waiving of page charges for articles longer than 12 printed pages: good news for petrologists, among others!

Authors are again reminded that the EJM has an Open Access option; it is to be expected that, in the future, grant agencies will place more and more emphasis on this type of publication.

After ‘Biominerals and biomimetic materials’ published in 2014, the next special issue will be ‘Characterization, diagnosis and conservation of cultural heritage’, with guest editors Germana Barone and Pierfranco Lattanzi, following an international school held in Siracusa (Sicily) on advanced methods for the study of cultural heritage. We are pleased to announce that Sergey Krivovichev has initiated the project of a special issue to honour our colleague Thomas Armbruster for his outstanding contribution to mineralogical crystallography. We are making a call for contributions, with a deadline for submissions on 15 May 2015. Suggestions for other thematic or special issues are welcome.

This is the place to thank all persons and institutions that contribute to the success of the EJM and maintain its high scientific standards: to authors and readers, to departing and continuing chief editors, to the board of associate editors (see inside cover page and home page) and the many referees (listed each year in issue no. 6) who guarantee the scientific quality of the material published, to Carlos Ayora and his successor Juan Jiménez Millán as representative of the Spanish Mineralogical Society in the Managing Committee, to EDP Sciences on the production side as well as our Publisher and Hilke Bornholdt at Schweizerbart, who take care of the technical quality and timely publication of the journal, and to the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for their continued support.