Beware the "predatory" open access journals

Governments are rightly asking those who receive public funding for research to publish their work in open-access journals. Many of Elsevier’s high quality journals, such as Minerals Engineering, now offer an open access option, which helps authors to publish in respected journals while also complying with the new open access policies and mandates. An open access publication fee is payable by the authors or their research funder, while if an author opts for subscription publication no fee is paid. The publication choice has no effect on the peer-review process or acceptance of the submitted article.

An unfortunate offshoot of the open access policy has been the growth of some very dubious publishers providing online journals requiring no subscription, and I hear an increasing number of reports of researchers being inundated with invitations to submit papers to these new journals.

One of my journal reviewers tells me that “in academia the problem is that everything has become about numbers of papers. Graduate student scholarships can be based on number of papers. Promotion and hiring is based on number of papers. Grants/research funds are based on number of papers. We are actually told by the administration how many papers we should have per year”. The temptation for young and inexperienced researchers may be to opt for ‘easy’ publication in one of these new journals, and then find that they are invoiced for a hefty fee in a very low-ranking publication.

Jeffrey Beall, associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has made it his mission to warn scholars about what he calls “predatory journals.” In 2010 he launched a list of questionable publishers and journals on his website with about 20 names. Today the website, Scholarly Open Access, lists more than 300 journal publishers. He maintains a separate list of stand-alone journals, numbering almost 200. Mr. Beall is quick to point out that the journals on his lists aren’t necessarily breaking any laws but that in his opinion, they are “low-quality publishers” with questionable practices that scholars should avoid.

Don’t be tempted by these dubious open-access journals. If your paper must be open access, then opt for a high quality option. In our field, Minerals Engineering, International Journal of Mineral Processing and Hydrometallurgy all provide open access options. Peer-review is very rigorous in these journals, but the rewards are high so don’t be tempted to go for the easy option.

Cornwall in full bloom

With just over a week to go before the start of Computational Modelling '13 and Physical Separation '13, Cornwall is now in full bloom. The springtime bluebells are now fading to be replaced by a profusion of wild flowers, making this perhaps the best time of the year to walk the coast path with your camera.

The photos below were taken today at Lizard Point, only 22 miles from Falmouth, the most southerly point of Great Britain.

The Lizard is also famous for being one of the only places in England where the Hottentot fig flourishes. This succulent is native to South Africa but has naturalised in many other regions of the world. Although beautiful, it is an invasive species which poses a serious threat to Cornwall's native plants.

Hottentot Figs

The Hottentot fig can also be seen at St. Mawes and in one small section of the cliffs at Falmouth- just in front of the St. Michael's Hotel, the MEI Conferences venue!

Rare Earths beneficiation paper is Minerals Engineering's most downloaded recent article

Some time ago (posting of 1st February) I discussed the increasing importance of rare earths and mentioned an excellent review of the beneficiation of rare earth metals which had just been published in Minerals Engineering.

It was pleasing to hear today that this is the paper with the most downloads from ScienceDirect between January and March (click here for the top 25 downloaded papers).

Even more pleasing is that two of the McGill University authors, Adam Jordens and Kristian Waters, will be presenting a paper on the processing of a rare earth mineral deposit, using gravity and magnetic separation, at Physical Separation '13 which starts on June 20th.

Towards Standardisation of Twitter Hashtags for Mineral Processing

Since its launch seven years ago Twitter has become a global phenomenon, but it is still in its infancy in minerals engineering. I have no doubt, however, that professional Twitter accounts will soon be as common as company websites (see also posting of 8th April).

Although more and more mineral processing companies are now tweeting, many are doing so with a great deal of uncertainty and naivety. This is particularly apparent in the use of hash (#) tags.

Twitter hashtags are essentially keywords which group tweets on a particular subject together for search purposes. They can be powerful in spreading your word, but for them to be successful consistency in their use is required, and it is also essential that the hashtags uniquely group mineral processing topics. For instance I see #flotation being commonly used, but this is not satisfactory, as relevant mineral processing tweets are lost in a mass of tweets on company flotations, buoyancy aids etc. For this reason the longer hashtag #FrothFlotation is suggested. Even worse is the common use of two hashtags, such as #column #flotation, rather than grouping tweets on column flotation with the single unique hashtag #columnflotation.

There is an obvious need to standardise hashtags for mineral processing tweets and to encourage consistency in their use. For this reason, MEI is attempting to produce a definitive reference list. The draft can be found on MEI Online. At this stage the hashtags are recommendations only and not a definitive standardised list. However we hope that, with your input, it will develop into such, and we ask you to send suggestions for amendments and new hashtags to bwills@min-eng.com.

We also ask that you make as many minerals engineers as possible aware of the list in order that consistent use of hashtags will soon be the norm.

Final Call for Abstracts for Flotation '13

Winter has arrived in Cape Town with a vengeance!  This was the scene at Camp's Bay on Monday:

Flotation '13 will be held in November, perhaps the best time to be in Cape Town, at the beginning of summer, and when the spring flowers are still in bloom.

There will be much going on around the conference (see posting of 27th May), an event not to be missed if you are involved with flotation. Exhibition space is now fully booked (see the list of exhibitors), but there are still excellent sponsorship opportunities available.

Current Sponsors

Flotation '11 special issue

If you would like to present a paper at the conference, abstracts should be submitted by the end of this month. Draft papers will be published in the Proceedings on flash-drive, and after the conference authors will be invited to submit final papers for peer-review and possible publication in the special flotation issue of Minerals Engineering.

The 4-day conference consists of two symposia. The first is Fundamentals: Physics and Chemistry and the keynote speaker is Prof. Kari Heiskanen of Aalto University, Finland, editor of International Journal of Mineral Processing (see posting of 27th March for more details).

The 2nd symposium, Applications and Plant Practice, has as its keynote speaker Dr. Dariusz Lelinski, of FLSmidth, USA, who will discuss True Value Added in Flotation.

In contrast to chilly Cape Town, Falmouth is enjoying the summer, and we are now less than 2-weeks away from Computational Modelling '13 and Physical Separation '13. It is not too late to register.

Falmouth's Swanpool Beach

Obsolescence. Is this the future for mineral processing?

Can comminution be eliminated from mining (posting of 20th May ) has generated a tremendous amount of interest, both here and on Minerals Engineers on LinkedIn. The interesting thing is that the initial discussion was inspired by the abstract of one of the keynote lectures at next year's Comminution '14, and at this stage we have no idea what the presenter, Alan Muir, will be putting forward as an alternative!

So will comminution eventually be phased out of mining operations? Most of the comments suggest that comminution will evolve and will be around for ever, but my bet would be that this, perhaps the least energy efficient of all major industrial processes, will eventually become extinct, but what will replace it?

Most probably far-off processes that we have not even dreamt about; but could any existing techniques provide a replacement? In situ leaching is a possibility, and this is currently used to extract water soluble salts such as sylvite and halite. Just under half of the world's uranium is produced by in situ leaching, most of the uranium produced in the USA and Kazakhstan being by this method. In situ leaching has also been used to dissolve oxidised copper minerals such as malachite and azurite.

But of course not all ores are amenable to leaching, and there is the inherent problem of contamination of ground water, as well as the very high cost of the reagents, which makes it prohibitive for many ores. So attempts to remove comminution from the flowsheet must follow a 'horses for courses" approach.

The mineralogy of many of the polymetallic ores containing economic amounts of copper, lead and zinc is a complex assembly of finely disseminated and intimately associated chalcopyrite, galena and sphalerite in a gangue consisting predominantly of pyrite or pyrrhotite (often 80-90%), quartz and carbonates. Extensive fine grinding is usually needed, usually to well below 75 microns. A classic example of the difficulty in treating these ores is the huge zinc-lead-silver deposit at McArthur River in Australia, one of the world’s largest zinc-lead deposits. Discovered in 1955, for 35 years it resisted attempts to find an economic processing route due to the very fine grained texture of the ore. However, the development of the IsaMill, together with an appropriate flotation circuit, allowed the ore to be successfully processed, and the mine was finally opened in 1995. The concentrator produces a bulk lead-zinc concentrate with an extremely fine product size of 80% minus 7 microns.

Grinding of complex massive sulphide ores consumes vast amounts of energy, and extremely fine mineral dissemination leads to relatively low concentrate grades, and high metal losses, not only in the flotation tailings, but into the ‘wrong’ concentrates, penalties often being imposed for the presence of zinc and lead in copper concentrates.

So is there a technique currently available that could eliminate the comminution step in the treatment of these important sources of base metals? Well, yes there is, and not only could it remove the comminution stage, but also the difficult and inefficient flotation stage! It may seem economically impossible, but it has been proven at pilot stage to be viable.

Amanda with Prof. Noel Warner in 2010 

Noel Warner is Emeritus Professor of Minerals Engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK. I got to know this genial Australian very well in the late 80s and early 90s when he was external examiner for the mineral processing degree at Camborne School of Mines. He used to talk passionately of the process that he and his team at Birmingham were developing for the treatment of polymetallic massive sulphide deposits. The process was direct ore smelting.

Polymetallic smelting of concentrates is established practice and is used in the copper-nickel industry to produce matte from bulk Cu-Ni-Co sulphide concentrates. The Imperial Smelting Furnace has been used for well over half a century for treating bulk lead-zinc concentrates, and the KIVCET process has been used to smelt complex Cu-Zn-Pb sulphides. But what was to become known as the Warner Process was more radical, in that it was the bulk ore that was smelted in a single furnace, the enormous amount of energy required to do this being recovered from the molten slag. Expensive comminution was avoided, apart from some preliminary crushing, and the inefficient flotation step was also by-passed. Pilot plant runs using McArthur River ore showed that zinc and lead recoveries could be well over 90% and with the adoption of innovative energy recovery technology, the thermal requirements could be satisfied by the inherent energy content of the ore itself. Large amounts of energy are consumed in melting the gangue minerals but dry granulation of the molten slag can transfer the slag energy into a carrier gas thereby allowing sensible heat to be passed back to the front-end of the process in an ore preheater. Under these conditions only the thermal losses have to be added and the energy demand is then more modest. The Birmingham team showed that the energy requirements of direct ore smelting can be competitive with conventional mineral processing, particularly for ores containing sulphides.

A comprehensive description of the Warner Process can be found in Minerals Engineering Vol. 2 No. 1 (1989), and a later paper in Vol. 22 Issues 9-10 (2009). Despite its attractions, the process has never been used at full scale, but maybe the time is approaching when it should be looked at more closely.

I have no doubt that comminution and concentration techniques will continue to evolve, but will there be a time when they lose the battle, when the remaining ores are so finely disseminated and intergrown that they can no longer be treated by physical methods? Is no mineral processing the future of mineral processing, and will the future be direct hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical routes? I look forward to your opinions.