Abstract
Welcome to the final issue of 2013 for IJME: Research. Your co-editors have some important updates for all considering submitting to the journal, based on the questions flowing to us over the last year. We hope this helps you determine a good course of action for submitting your work and seeing it through to publication.
We have enjoyed working with our authors, and appreciate their patience, as we have gone through two transitions since August 2012. First, we have transitioned the editorial “office” to California, meaning 1) significant time learning the system used by our fearless former Editor Chris Johnson, and 2) training our graduate assistants who provide clerical support on these systems. Second, we have worked with SAGE staff to design and implement the new online submission system. This has involved tutorials, conference calls, new procedures for our reviewers to learn, setting up new accounts and passwords, and trial testing of the system. We now have 10 papers that have been submitted successfully through the online system to IJME: Research, all under review. These include papers submitted to the journal between late April and June 2013 that we have channeled through the online system in order to test it. So far all is going well and we expect to have the first few papers completely through their first review by the time this issue goes to print. Please continue to be patient with us over the next year, as we will be managing papers through both systems until the papers submitted prior to mid-April 2013 have gone through the entire review process. Information on the online submission website may be found below.
We have been blessed with many submissions over the last three or so years, and much of this work is solid enough to move into the revision process. Authors are quite happy that we have the ability to publish through Online First, which allows a paper to be published and disseminated (and counted for tenure and promotion processes) online before the journal comes out in hard copy printing. We are eager to move the papers in the publication queue to Online First publication as quickly as possible. We and SAGE editorial staff must be quite meticulous with this process, both to get the proofs correct and to make certain we have the correct number of pages in each issue. We are allocated a certain number of pages per year and this must be managed carefully to make the most of our limited resource of print pages.
To this end, we have two points to share. First, we must be quite adamant about length of papers for submission. We will only consider submissions that are 20 pages or less (including references, tables, and figures) for the time being, until we feel we are in a position to consider longer papers. This is all a balancing act of determining how many papers may fit into each issue; obviously, when we publish longer papers, it pushes more authors to a later issue.
The second point to consider is the abstract. IJME: Research has a long-held practice of publishing the abstracts in French, Spanish, German, and Chinese in print version and online. To save pages in the print version, we are now moving to publishing those abstracts online only (beginning with the first 2014 issue). This will allow us to fit in more papers per journal. Also, we have had wonderful help from our translators for French, Spanish, and Chinese abstracts, but we have a perennial difficulty arranging for German translations. It is IJME: Research’s desire to publish all abstracts in German; we invite any music education scholars with German translation skills to notify the editors of their willingness to assist with German translations in the future. Of course, our translators are given credit for their assistance! When we are able to procure the German translations for the papers in the current issue, they will be added to the online publication post hoc. One way that authors may help us in moving their papers to publication more quickly is to assist with translations of their own papers. If you have colleagues or friends with skills in any of these languages, and would like to provide some or all of the translations, this allows us to consider the paper for hard copy publication sooner. It also allows you control of verifying the translation’s accuracy. Of course, we will arrange for providing translations as before but we want contributors to know this is an option.
Please be aware that there will be a call for a new co-editor and new reviewers for the review panel coming soon, as Beatriz Ilari and several of our reviewers will end their years of service at the next international meeting in South America. We will be looking for strong reviewers from across the globe, representing a mix of research methodologies, and (very important) a commitment to reading papers, giving substantive feedback, and communicating with the editors on a reliable basis. Over the last year, generally our reviewers have received a paper about every other month (from three to eight papers during the year) depending on their areas of expertise and interest. One should also consider that all papers that are accepted for a minor or major revision will then be read again by the review panel. It is extremely important that reviewers are timely in reading and communicating their feedback to the editors; delays hold up the review process and lead to longer publication queue timelines than we would like. Please be thinking of colleagues whom you might nominate for our review board, or consider it for yourself!
Some authors have asked for a list of databases where IJME can be found. This information is available at http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal201697/abstractIndexing. We are also in the process of applying to ISI to consider adding the journal to the Social Sciences Citation Index, as well as the Arts and Humanities Index. We will keep you posted about any new developments in the near future.
To end, we look forward to many more exceptional papers on a range of music education topics flowing in over the next few months. Please open an account and upload your papers through the ScholarOne website for International Journal of Music Education. This may be found at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijme.
Enjoy your reading!