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The new year brings several changes and innovations that will be consequential for readers, authors, and the editorial and production teams of the Journal of Research in Music Education. As readers who are NAfME members are aware, the biennial Music Research and Teacher Education Conference will be taking place in November, 2020, and recurring in the late autumn of even-numbered years. (The call for conference proposals appears elsewhere in this issue.) This is a change from the past schedule in which the conference was held in the early spring. In that configuration, the conference coincided with the nomination and selection of new JRME editorial board members; nominations were submitted before the conference and the current editorial and SRME boards met during the conference to review the nominations and to select incoming members.

The new conference schedule necessitated either a change in timeline for editorial board appointments or a decoupling of the conference and board selection process. We decided on the latter approach. As with past practice, editorial board nominations will be solicited during the first part of the calendar year (the call for nominations is included in this issue) and the current editorial and SRME boards will review the nominations and identify new members in the spring through web-based meetings. Rather than using the national conference as a venue for the review process, the biennial gathering will now become an opportunity for the full board to meet in person and for the newly-appointed members to meet their new colleagues and become familiar with the journal’s practices and procedures.

In the past, the co-occurrence of board nominations with the national conference provided a handy cue that drew attention to this important opportunity for professional service. Although the two events will now be separated in time, the identification of new JRME board members is no less important. Aside from being recognition of significant scholarly achievement, JRME board membership is one of the few roles in our field that allows an individual to make such a direct impact on the quality and direction of music education research, or the way in which music education scholarship connects with the broader array of related research communities. I encourage colleagues for whom the study of music teaching and learning is a central part of their professional activity to consider stepping forward for such a position of leadership.

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Coincident with the new year, the JRME has updated its publication style requirements to the new 7th edition of the American Psychological Association manual. The 6th edition of the manual has been the guiding stylistic source for many authors over the past decade and the appearance of a new edition will mean that many of us will need to unlearn some well-rehearsed habits. However, many of the changes are the result of efforts to increase simplicity in writing style or to be responsive to the changing ways in which language is used to represent the world around us.

For example, all journal and periodical references should now include issue numbers when available. Although this seems like a minor change, each of us is familiar with the extra time and, sometimes, frustration involved with determining whether an article was taken from a journal paginated by issue or by volume. Also new is use of the singular third-person “they.” This will ensure that all possible gender references are included when using non-specific singular language. A summary of some of the more notable changes can be found here: https://apastyle.apa.org/products/publication-manual-7th-edition-introduction.pdf.