Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

Contemporary Musicology sees its mission in creating a platform for open and professional discussions around topical issues of musicology based on the best traditions of Russian and world research.

The mission and the goal of the journal is to develop the best traditions of Russian humanitarian scholarship and broad connections with world academic thought, and dissemination of results of research by scholars from Russia and other countries in the international academic space.
 
The main auditorium of the journal is consisted of professional musicologists, performer musicians, teachers of all the links of musical education, students and post-graduate students, researchers in the sphere of humanitarian disciplines, and research associates.

Journal’s Scope
The Journal’s scope covers various topics dealing with music theory and history, music performance, modern music education and pedagogy, methodology of music studies in cultural and artistic contexts. The Journal’s scope corresponds to the subject categories of 5.10.3. Types of Art (Music Art).

Journal Subject Headings

Music composition techniques
Music theater
Early music
History of foreign music
History of Russian music
Musical creativity of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries
Classics of the 20th century
History of music in letters and documents
Music and the word
Musicology in the context of humanitarian knowledge

Article Types
Contemporary Musicology publishes original research and review articles, including those based on the results of doctoral (Dr. Sci.) and candidate (Cand. Sci.) dissertations, translations of significant foreign publications with analytical commentaries, reviews of new books on music, post-publication scientific discussion.

 

Section Policies

 

Peer Review Process

Peer review

All manuscripts submitted to the Contemporary Musicology journal undergo the mandatory procedure of double-blind peer review. This means that the identities of reviewers and authors are concealed from each other throughout the review process. Peer review is carried out on a voluntary and gratuitous basis.

Preliminary review of the submissions is performed by the Editor-in-Chief to determine their scientific quality, correspondence to the Journal’s thematic scope and technical requirements. At this stage, the submission can be rejected in the following cases: the manuscript does not correspond to the Journal’s subject fields; the materials were previously published in another journal; the overall scientific quality of the manuscript is insufficient; the submitted materials reveal a fundamental contradiction to the ethical principles adhered to by the Journal (see the Ethics section for details).

All submissions that have successfully passed the preliminary review stage are forwarded for peer review with the purpose of their expert evaluation. Peer review is carried out by the Editorial Board members and external experts. Reviewers are selected from among established experts on the subject of the reviewed materials, who have had relevant publications over the past 3 years.

All submissions are subject to double-blind peer review by at least two specialists in the field.

In the evaluation process, the reviewer focuses on:
• the correspondence of the manuscript’s content to the Journal’s scope;
• scientific relevance of the topic;
• appropriateness of cited sources and depth of their analysis;
• research novelty;
• absence of inappropriate borrowings;
• rigor of the research methodology;
• validity of the conclusions, theoretical and practical significance of the results.

Following the analysis of the manuscript, the reviewer decides:
• to recommend the manuscript for publication in its current form (without revision);
• to recommend the manuscript for publication after minor revision;
• to recommend the manuscript for publication after major revision;
• to reject the manuscript.

Additional peer-review rounds may be necessary when:
• the manuscript discusses controversial issues that require comparison of different opinions to make a publication decision;
• the author has fundamentally changed the original manuscript after the reviewers’ comments.

The peer-review decision is typically made within the period of 30 days from the submission of the manuscript. The Editor forwards the peer-review results to the authors within the period of 10 days from their receipt.

The reviews are stored at the Journal’s office for a period of five years. The reviews may also be forwarded on request to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.

 

Open Access Policy

Contemporary Musicology is an open-access journal. All articles are made freely available to readers immediately upon publication to support the principle of global knowledge exchange.

Our open access policy (Open Access: Platinum Open Access) was developed in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition. This implies that all publications become freely available on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
For more information, please refer to the BOAI statement.

 

Publication Ethics

Ethical Aspects of Editorial Policy

Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Musicology is responsible for reviewing the submitted manuscripts in strict compliance with the principles of scientific publishing ethics and for observing the adherence to the rules stipulated therein.

All publication decisions are based exclusively on the scientific rigor, validity, and novelty of the work in question.

The editorial policy of Contemporary Musicology is based on internationally recognized best practices in scholarly publishing and the valid legislation of the Russian Federation with respect to copyright.

All parties to the publication process – editors, reviewers, and authors – should make every effort to adhere to the Ethical Code of Contemporary Musicology.

The Ethical Code has been developed based on the following documents:
• Standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), formulated in the CORE PRACTICES
• Recommendations of the Association of Science Editors and Publishers (ASEP)

The Journal reserves the right to act in accordance with COPE recommendations in cases where violation of this Ethical Code is suspected.

Ethical Responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Team

The Editorial Team bear full responsibility for conducting a fair and objective evaluation of the submitted manuscripts, independent of commercial interests and market needs.

The Editorial Team judge each submission based on its scholarly merits, without regard to the race, religion, nationality, gender, or institutional affiliation of the author(s).

The Editorial Team must declare potential conflicts of interest that could influence the publication decision. The Editor should refrain from considering manuscripts, in which they have conflicts of interest, and pass them for consideration to another member of the Editorial Team.

The Editorial Team must keep the peer-review process confidential from anyone except from those directly involved in the publication process. Information or ideas contained in the submitted manuscripts must never be used for the Editors’ personal benefit.

Unpublished materials of submitted manuscripts shall never be used or distributed to third parties without written consent of the author.

Ethical Responsibilities of Reviewers

The Reviewers shall:

• provide an objective and unbiased assessment of the work under review, expressing their opinion clearly and refraining from any personal criticism;
• consider a manuscript under review as a confidential document, which cannot be forwarded to third parties and be used for personal benefit;
• decline the review invitation in cases where the reviewer feels unqualified to assess the proposed work and inform timely the Editor-in-Chief about the need to appoint another reviewer.

Ethical Responsibilities of Authors

The author(s) bear personal responsibility for the submitted materials and shall ensure:

• the originality and reliability of data;
• the absence of inappropriate borrowings and plagiarism;
• the absence of claims from third parties, including regarding the use of figures and illustrations;
• that all persons who made a significant intellectual contribution to the research have been named as co-authors;
• that all co-authors have read the final version of the text and approved it for publication;
• that the manuscript has not been previously published and is not under consideration in any other journal;
• disclosure of potential or actual conflicts of interest.

 

Editorial Policy

Anti-plagiarism Policy

The authors guarantee that the manuscript submitted to the Contemporary Museology journal is their original work, which has not been published before and is not currently under consideration in any other journal. In cases where fragments of previously published works (own and/or belonging to other authors) are used, these must be appropriately cited. Any form of plagiarism constitutes unethical academic behavior, thus being unacceptable. Incorrect borrowings are subject to correction by the author in accordance with the Author Guide.

All manuscripts submitted to the Editorial Board of Contemporary Museology are subject to mandatory examination using the Antiplagiat system and other instruments. The authors are notified of all the revealed cases of plagiarism or incorrect borrowings.

Forms of plagiarism may include:
• use of any materials (verbatim reproduction) published in other editions without indicating the original source;
• use of images, pictures, photographs, tables, schemes or any other forms of graphical information without indicating the original source;
• use of any materials published in scientific and popular editions without approval of the copyright holder;
• use of the materials without written permission, whose authors or copyright holders do not permit use of their materials without their preliminary formal approval.

Forms of incorrect borrowing may include:
• reference not to the primary source of the borrowed text without clear indication of this fact, which may result in mistakes with the determination of the primary source;
• incorrect referencing (incomplete bibliographic description) of the sources, which prevents their identification;
• absence of references from the text to the sources listed in the Reference list;
• excessive citation (in case there are references to the sources and graphical highlighting of the cited text), the volume of which is not justified by the genre and aims of the article;
• data falsification / fabrication.

Any manuscript or published article, in which plagiarism has been detected, shall be withdrawn from the publication process, even after its publication (retracted).

Retraction policy

A retraction procedure in compliance with the COPE protocol is applied whenever the Editorial Board of Contemporary Museology:
• receives evidence of the fraudulence of the published information as a result of either the authors’ conscious actions or bona fide errors (such as non-intentional errors);
• receives evidence of multiple publications or multiple submissions;
• reveals the fact of a deliberate or non-intentional concealment of a conflict of interest, which could have affected the interpretation of the data or recommendations on the use of the obtained results.
Retraction is aimed at correcting errors in published materials and informing the readership about the publications containing such errors. Retraction does not lead to deletion of the publication from the website of the Journal or corresponding citation databases. A retraction note is published alongside the original publication. The original article is retained unchanged, except for a watermark on the .pdf indicating “retraction”. This is of particular importance, since the publication may have already been cited by third parties. Information about retracted articles is presented on the website of Contemporary Musicology.

 

Journal Subject Headings

Music composition techniques
Music theater
Early music
History of foreign music
History of Russian music
Musical creativity of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries
Classics of the 20th century
History of music in letters and documents
Music and the word
Musicology in the context of humanitarian knowledge

 

Statement of malpractice

The Editorial Board, Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Team strictly follow the ethical behavior of the parties involved in the publication of articles in the journal. This statement is based on the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and takes into consideration the interests of the founders, presented by twelve Russian Arts Academies.

All the articles not complying with these standards will not be published, if malpractices are proved to take place. Abusing of power by the officials against to the interests of the journal, if the act is committed because of mercenary or other personal interest, and entails a substantial violation of the rights and legitimate interests of all participants of editorial and publishing process is subject to Federal law.

 

Conflict of Interests

1. General Principles

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in its guidelines defines a conflict of interests in the following way:

A conflict of interests takes place when authors, reviewers and editors have implicit interests that could have an influence upon their opinion about the published material.

A potential conflict of interests occurs when there are financial, personal or professional conditions that could have an effect on the scholarly opinion of the reviewer or editor and as a consequence, on the decision of the editorial board concerning the publication of the article.

2. Obligations in Relation to a Conflict of Interests

The journal “Contemporary Musicology” does not require a formal declaration upon the emergence of a conflict of interests. Nevertheless, it is trusted, that the author submitting the article to the editorial board of the journal, states that:

• All sources of funding for research activity are indicated in the text of the article;
•  There are no commercial, financial, personal or professional factors that could cause a conflict of interests in relation to the submitted for the consideration article.

Upon the emergence of a conflict of interests the author can:

•  Ask for excluding a concrete editor and/or reviewer from the process of reviewing the corresponding manuscript;
•  Utter the explicit statement about a possible conflict of interests in the text of a cover letter when submitting an article to the editorial board.


Editors jointly with reviewers shall not leave unnoticed any conflicts of interests that may have an influence on the decision of the editorial board.

Upon the emergence of a conflict of interests of an editor and/or reviewer with the author of the manuscript, the article is transferred to another reviewer.

The emergence of a conflict of interests claimed by one of the participants of the process of consideration or reviewing does not mean the rejection for publishing.

All interested parties must avoid the emergence of conflicts of interests in any forms at all stages of presenting the article for publication. Upon the emergence of conflict situations in any form, the person first discovered such a conflict must immediately inform the editor and shall take all the necessary measuring for restoring infringed-upon rights.

 

Criteria for Authorship, Co-authorship

The term “author” refers to all persons (co-authors) who have made a substantial contribution to conducting the research and creation of the manuscript and responsible for its content. The person (author) who has submitted the manuscript to the editorial board shall bear responsibility for the complete list of the group of authors and the changes made to the manuscript in accordance with the results of the peer reviewing and editing.

1. Authorship is based on the following criteria:

1) The author made a substantial contribution to the research activity and development of concept, collected the data, made analysis and interpretation of the data.

2) The author carried out the writing of the text of draft articles and edited it attentively and substantially.

3) The author approved the final version of the article prior to its submission.

4) The author bears responsibility for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript.

2. The authors shall guarantee that the submitted manuscript is the original work.

3. Scholarly reviews for some issue or other should be objective, present material in a wide range and at the same time take into account the views of the author of the review.

4. The authorship of scholarly publications is obligated to reflect accurately the contribution of individuals to the research activity, with specific information about the authors.

5. The authors may not mislead the readers by publishing acknowledgements of gratitude to people who were not actually involved in writing the work. Other persons who made contribution to the work, but are nevertheless not the authors, may be listed in the rubric of “Acknowledgements,” with indications of the type and extent of their activities.

6. Authors are obligated to provide a description of their contribution to the publication.

7. The order of authorship must be a joint resolution of co-authors. The authors should be ready to explain the order of their enumeration and listing.

8. The authors shall be entirely responsible for the correct definition of authorship acting in accordance with the rules adopted in their institution.

9. Investigators must ensure that only those persons who meet the criteria for authorship (that made a significant contribution to the work), shall be considered the authors, and the researchers who do not merit authorship will be excluded from the list of authors.

 

Author Fees

The Journal charges no article processing charges (APC) for publication, peer review, and indexing.

Honorariums are not paid for publications of materials submitted to the editorial board.

The Journal is published at the expense of the Publisher.

 

Publication Frequency

The journal is published four times a year.

 

Advertising

Advertising is not published in the Journal.