JOURNAL COMMENT

This issue contains just one paper from the University of South Africa (UNISA), the only South African university offering mining engineering and mine surveying by open distance learning. Lugoma explores the possibility of supplementing online course content with on-campus practical sessions. The encouraging findings have prompted him to roll out this approach to education so as to enable students to familiarize themselves with mine surveying equipment before they begin their professional careers.

It must be noted that of the 10 papers originally submitted by UNISA, seven were rejected by the refereeing process; one paper was withdrawn, and one is still being revised prior to possible publication at a later date. The referees were almost unanimous in their reasons for rejection, which were: lack of structure in the paper; the content of the paper did not correspond with the title description; and the results of the work did not produce anything that is not already well known.

I hope that this will not deter the researchers at UNISA from submitting papers on their work in the future, and that the constructive comments by the referees will enable researchers and authors to produce papers of an acceptable standard for publication in the Journal of the SAIMM.

The diligence of the referees of the UNISA papers is commendable in that they provided meaningful feedback to the authors and at the same time contributed to maintaining the standard of the publications in our Journal.

D.Tudor

Editorial Consultant