The SAIMM bids farewell to Dave Tudor, Editor of the SAIMM Journal and Chair of the Publications Committee, who is relocating to the UK.
Dave hails from Oswestry, a historic market town in Shropshire, England, close to the Welsh border. He graduated from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) with a degree in Chemical Engineering, and began his career with Anglo American in Zambia, where he worked at the Rokana smelter in Kitwe and the lead-zinc operation at Broken Hill (now Kabwe).
Returning to the UK in 1977, he held a variety of positions – as a process engineer, an industrial engineer with Michelin Tyre, works manager of a custom powder milling operation, and as an expatriate recruitment officer for the Zambian mining industry. He moved to Canada in 1982 for a short spell with Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting, and then returned to Africa to join Anglo’s Gold and Uranium Division at Vaal Reefs, moving successively to Freegold North, Amcoal (now Anglo Coal) New Vaal Colliery, and to the Johannesburg head office in 1997, from where he retired in 2003.
Dave’s ten years as Editor have seen a number of far-reaching changes in the way the SAIMM Journal is produced and distributed, which have considerably enhanced the impact and accreditation of the Journal. Journal papers dating back to 1969, as well as conference proceedings, are now freely available on the SAIMM website to anyone, in line with one of the main strategic objectives of the SAIMM – to disseminate scientific and technical information to the benefit of the mining and metallurgical industries. There is an initiative currently underway to scan and upload all of the remaining historical copies of the Journal (dating from 1894). This is supported by the Carnegie Foundation (as part of their effort to get a wider range of African journals online) and Sabinet. Open access to older historical material will provide a rich source of information to readers who otherwise would have struggled to obtain it.
The reviewing process has been migrated to the Open Journal System (OJS), resulting in a substantially paper-free process to manage progress from submission to publication. Indexing of our Journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ benefits the Institute and its members through increased dissemination, and hence a wider audience for published papers and better visibility for the authors. The recent year-on-year improvement in our Journal Impact Factor and source-normalized impact per paper (SNIP) factor is a clear indication that the SAIMM Journal is finding a wider readership with each passing year.
The SAIMM Journal is listed in the OneMine global mining database, the Web of Science, Scopus, the African Journal Archive, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA, South Africa’s premier open-access (free to access and to publish) searchable full-text journal database. Our Journal was accepted into the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) early in 2018. Accreditation with the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and SciELO SA ensures that papers published in our Journal are recognized by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and are eligible for subsidization, a feature that is very important to academia in Southern Africa.
Together, these initiatives have raised the profile of the SAIMM Journal and contributed to it being recognized as one of the most respected mining technical publications in the world, ranked as a ‘premier journal’ by the international Society of Mining Professors (SOMP).
Dave has been a Fellow of the SAIMM since 2009, and in August 2017 he was elected Honorary Life Fellow.
The SAIMM extends its deepest thanks to Dave for his tireless devotion and enthusiasm. We shall miss him, and we wish him and his family everything of the best.