Mine Water and the Environment

Notes for Contributors

ISSN 1025-9112 (print version)
ISSN 1616-1068 (electronic version)

General Remarks

Legal Requirements

The author(s) guarantee(s) that the manuscript will not be published elsewhere in any language without the consent of the copyright holders, that the rights of third parties will not be violated, and that the publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Authors wishing to include figures or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Manuscripts must be accompanied by the “Copyright Transfer Statement”. The signed form can be mailed, faxed, or scanned and e-mailed to the Editor. The form is regularly published in this journal or can be obtained from http://springeronline.com/journal/10230. Please see the journal for copyright details.

Scope

Mine Water and the Environment welcomes original contributions that address either technical questions or practical issues related to the evaluation, prediction, prevention, or control of water problems at mining operations or their impact on the environment. The journal and its audience are interdisciplinary. Manuscripts should convey new technical information and be of potential interest to researchers and/or practitioners in this field. Laboratory and field experiments, modelling efforts, studies of relevant field sites, technical evaluations of new technology, and engineering applications are all appropriate.

Papers may be submitted in one of two formats. Generally, researchers will prefer to submit manuscripts that will be edited and peer reviewed; authors of such manuscripts will receive the reviewers’ comments and be given the opportunity to address them before a final decision is made regarding publication. Alternatively, contributors can submit (generally) shorter manuscripts to quickly convey information to others in the field. Limited case studies, field trials, or new developments by the mining industry and details of new methods, techniques, or technology will be appropriate for this format. These manuscripts will be referred to as technical communications, and will be edited but not peer-reviewed; the editors alone will decide if the manuscripts are appropriate for publication in this journal. This format should provide a forum for practitioners and others in the field to let people know of their successes and failures, and for researchers to share their results quickly or to publish studies that are not as comprehensive as might be expected in a peer reviewed text. Technical communications are not intended to serve as advertisements. Authors who step over this boundary will be asked to modify the manuscript or to pay the appropriate page charges and have their text appropriately labeled.

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Submission of Manuscripts

The journal encourages the submission of manuscripts electronically or on disk, preferably in Microsoft Word PC. Please make sure you save the file with your fonts included. A hard copy of the paper does not need to be provided. However, a signed hard copy of the “Copyright Transfer Statement” must be mailed, faxed, or scanned and electronically transmitted to the Editor. Manuscripts can be sent by e-mail to editor@IMWA.info or uploaded to the IMWA web site at http://www.IMWA.info/minewaterenv

Using the electronic copy, the editors will attempt to correct errors of style and grammar before manuscripts are sent out for peer review. This, in turn, should enable the reviewers to concentrate on content and technical validity. Authors are encouraged to have their colleagues review their paper before it is submitted to the journal, to use the format of this journal, and to submit the names and e-mail addresses of appropriate reviewers who have not already seen a draft of the paper.

It is the submitting author’s responsibility to ensure that all other authors have approved the manuscript before submission. Generally, papers submitted should not have been published or have been submitted for publication elsewhere, but exceptions will be made for papers published in venues generally unavailable to most of the readers of this journal. Examples would include papers presented at conferences that generally only distribute the proceedings to attendees, papers published in a language other than English, or papers published in a generally unrelated field. However, in such cases, the author(s) must retain the copyright and thus have the legal right to republish it in this journal.

Authors who are unable to submit their manuscripts as computer files should mail three copies of their neatly typed manuscript to one of the editors on good quality paper and with clear typescript. Authors who can submit their text as a computer file but do not have the capacity to incorporate figures, tables, equations, formulae, etc. should send both a hard copy and the computer file. Note – manuscripts submitted electronically will not receive preferential treatment by the editors, but will most likely move through the editorial and review process more quickly than papers submitted only on hard copy.

There are no page charges for technical contributions, only for advertisements. Individuals who wish to become members of IMWA should contact the IMWA treasurer, Lee C. Atkinson, phone: +1 303 969-8033; fax: +1 303 969-8357; e-mail: treasurer@IMWA.info; HCItasca Denver, Inc.; 143 Union Blvd. Suite 525; Lakewood, Colorado, 80228. Personal Membership costs $40 (U.S.) per year (€ 32 starting in 2009), which includes a free subscription to this journal. A copy of the application form and more information on IMWA and this journal is available at http://www.IMWA.info.

Format of the Journal

Introductionary recommendations

Authors are strongly encouraged to follow the instructions provided below to reduce the amount of work the editors will have to do before the manuscripts are sent out for peer review. All papers must be submitted in English, using either American or British spellings. The editors will assist authors who struggle with English to insure that the text is written to clearly express what you intended. The length of the papers will vary, depending on what is needed to describe and interpret the work clearly and concisely. The editors reserve the right to modify the text to improve grammar, adjust style, reduce verbiage, and maintain uniform standards prior to sending the manuscripts out for peer review, but will not make substantive changes without the approval of the submitting author.

In general, papers should be written concisely in the past tense, and should generally not exceed 20 typed pages (≈ 5000 words). Use the Times New Roman 11 point font. Italics and boldface fonts may be used, if desired. If English units are used, equivalent SI units must be provided in parentheses. Furthermore, you should indicate decimal points with periods rather than commas.

Please avoid footnotes wherever possible. Please format your document as A4 size, with 1.7 cm margins on the top, left and right side and 3.7 cm at the bottom. Do not attempt to put it into two columns; that is best done when the document is at least partially through the editorial and review process. However, figures and tables should be sized to fit into one column (8.5 cm) if possible; if that is not possible, it is best if it fills the width of the two columns; this is discussed in more detail below.

Titles should be concise and informative. Affiliations and full addresses must be provided for all authors. In addition, the e-mail address, telephone, and fax numbers of the communicating author should be provided. Each paper should be provided with a results-oriented abstract of no more than 200 words. 5 to 10 key words including geographical region taken from GeoRef should be supplied after the abstract for indexing purposes.

References in the text are cited as Smith and Jones (1990) or (Smith and Jones 1990). A series of references in the text should appear in alphabetical order. References having three or more authors are cited: Smith et al. (1990). References by the same author(s) in the same year should be distinguished by letters (e.g. Smith 1990a or 1990a,b). Personal communications should be cited in the text but not listed in the reference section. At the end of the paper, references are listed alphabetically. Please make sure that journals’ titles are correctly abbreviated.

Examples

Brown MC, Wigley TC, Ford, DC (1969) Water budget studies in karst aquifers. J Hydrology 9:113—116

Caruccio FT, Geidel G (1984) Induced alkaline recharge zones to mitigate acidic seeps. In: Groves DH, DeVere RW (Eds), 1984 Symp of Surface Mining, Hydrology, Sedimentology and Reclamation, Univ of Kentucky, p 27—36

Gammons CH, Mulholland TP, Frandsen AK (2000) A comparison of filtered vs. unfiltered metal concentrations in treatment wetlands. Mine Water Environ 19(2):111—123.

Jennings JN (1971) An Introduction to Systematic Geomorphology – Vol 7, Karst. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 252 pp

Use of generally understood abbreviations is encouraged, and to save space, periods may be omitted if the meaning is clear without it (e.g. Symp). The author should be prepared to supply, on request, a preprint of any article listed as being “in press”.

Generally, two levels of headings are used. Main headings are left justified and in bold type and are separated from the text above by a blank line of text. The heading is not underlined. No heading numbering system is used. Sub-headings are similar except that they are not in bold type. All headings are in “Title Case”, that is, with a capital letter at the start of each word except short articles and conjunctions like “a”, “the” and “and”. If a third level of heading is required, it should be italicised, with only the initial letter of the initial word capitalized.

The editor will convert the manuscript into the journal’s two-column format after all of the revisions have been made. To facilitate this, figures and tables should be sized to fit within an 8.5 cm (3.35 inch) column whenever possible. Figures and tables that cannot fit within a single column should not exceed a width of 17.6 cm (6.93 inch). The maximum length is 23 cm (9.06 inch).

Authors should provide an electronically readable version within the text, if possible. More details on format follows. Figures should be incorporated into the text after the first reference to the figure in the paper. The figure legend should appear at the base of the figure, and should be labelled as in figure 1.

Table 1. Scan quality for journal

Figure 1. Mine water precipitates in a flooded German underground mine. Width: 50 cm.

Equations are often difficult to reproduce in text, due to the variety of software used to create them. Accordingly, authors should include them in the text, but should also provide a reproducible hard copy of the equations so that the correct equation can be included in the review and journal text. Equations should be centered, and if a series of equations are provided, sequentially numbered on the right hand side of the page.

Please don’t use your word processor’s autonumbering tool as this might get messed up during the editorial process. Therefore, before you submit your manuscript make sure that all hyperlinks and internal references are converted to plain text (e.g. in WinWord press STR+SHIFT+F9 to remove all such links).

Illustrations (electronic format)

General

Send us the illustrations, ideally both integrated into the document and in the original format they were prepared in case they need to be modified. Illustrations made with the graphic tools of your word processor (e.g. MS Graph) can not be used in a high quality editorial and printing process.

Halftone illustrations

Before you include your graph in the manuscript, crop all unwanted parts. Please don’t use JPG-Format, as those graphs usually reproduce poorly! As a rule of thumb, one column graphs at a 300 dpi resolution need 1,000 pixels width. Only use TIFF files using the resolutions listed in Table 1. Please check that your original, after scaling, has the resolution values in the table; only then will the print quality of the scan be sufficient. Suitable image processing programs are: Photoshop, Picture Publisher, Photo Paint, and Paint Shop Pro.

Vector graphics

Vector graphics exported from a drawing program should be stored in WMF (Windows Meta File for PC) or EPS (Encapsulated Post Script with preview) format. Fonts used in the graphics must be included (command: Convert text objects [fonts] to path outlines). Please do not draw with hairlines. The minimum line width is 0.2 mm (i.e. 0.6 pt) measured at the final scale. Suitable drawing programs are: Freehand, Illustrator, Corel Draw, Designer.

Spreadsheet graphics

Please, do not frame your graphics and legends and do not draw with hairlines. Furthermore, remove all horizontal and vertical grid lines.

Colours

Colour illustrations are free of charge for all papers submitted to the journal.

Free copy

1 complimentary copy is supplied to the communicating author.