British Journal of Music Education
For information about submitting a paper, please see Submitting your materials.
Questions regarding potential submissions or special issues should be addressed to the Editors:
- Professor Martin Fautley Email: martin.fautley@bcu.ac.uk
- Dr Ally Daubney Email: A.Daubney@sussex.ac.uk
1. Manuscript preparation
Length
Articles should usually be around 5,000 words long, but shorter research notes or more substantial pieces will be considered where the subject matter warrants it. Authors should provide a word count at the end of each article. The author’s name should be given on a separate sheet (see Biographical note below) to facilitate the anonymous refereeing process.
Abstract and Keywords
An abstract of about 100 words summarising the content of the article, and three to five keywords, should be given immediately below the title and before the main text. A note giving details of any acknowledgements may also be included.
Biographical note
A biography of around 75 words giving the author’s name, affiliation, musical education and major research interests, etc. should be submitted on a separate cover sheet. The author’s name should be given on a separate sheet to facilitate the anonymous refereeing process. Full contact details should also be included on this sheet, as well as a competing interests declaration (see below for guidance on what this declaration should look like).
Language
Articles must be written in English, using British conventions of spelling and punctuation when these differ from American usage. Contributors whose native language is not English are strongly urged to have their articles reviewed by a native speaker prior to submission. It is the Author's responsibility to comply with this request.
Writing should be clear, and jargon free; subheadings are helpful in long articles. All forms of racial and gender stereotyping should be avoided, and language should be inclusive and mindful of an international audience.
Abbreviations and acronyms
All acronyms should be given in full at their first mention, bearing in mind that the readership of the journal is an international one, thus: postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE).
Format
When an article has been accepted for publication, authors must send a word file (.doc), accompanied by an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file readable with Acrobat Reader. Do not send an article in .pdf format only. Do not attempt to format the file for journal style or introduce macros. Tables must be included in the word file but placed after the references at the end of the document along with any figure captions. All figures must be supplied as separate TIFF or EPS files.
2. Submitted audio and video examples
It is hoped that contributors will take the opportunity to present audio and/or video examples to illustrate their articles, where appropriate. These examples will appear as supplementary material alongside the electronic version of the article on Cambridge Journals Online.
Type and quality
Audio and video examples should be submitted in a standard file format and should not normally exceed 10MB. AAC files are preferred for audio examples, and MP4 files for video examples. All files should be clearly labelled.
Permission
Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not hold copyright and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their typescript. The costs of permission will be the responsibility of the author. For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
Music and video files are normally made available for download but may be streamed where the permission agreement stipulates this.
Ethical guidelines
Please see BERA’s Revised Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2004).
http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/2008/09/ethica1.pdf
Specifically: researchers must recognise a participant’s entitlement to privacy and must accord them their rights to confidentiality and anonymity, unless they or their guardians or responsible others, specifically and willingly waive that right. Contributors are advised that, where a person, particularly a child, is visible in a video example or illustration, such a waiver in writing is necessary.
3. Publishing ethics
Authors should check the British Journal of Music Education's publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials, as well as the additional instructions regarding publishing ethics on this page.
4. Quotations and references
All references must be cited by date in parentheses, e.g. (Green, 2001) or Green (2001). Text citation groups should be in chronological order, e.g. (Green, 2001; Adams, 2004), and all references listed alphabetically by surname at the end of the paper (please follow the punctuation given here):
For books: Surname, initials, publication date (in parentheses), title in italics. Place of publication: publisher.
For articles: Surname, initials, publication date (in parentheses), full title. Journal title (in italics), volume number (in bold), issue number, page numbers.
For book chapters: Surname, initials, publication date (in parentheses), title. ‘In’ editor’s name, book title (in italics), page extent of chapter in parentheses. Place of publication: publisher.
Footnotes should be used only if essential, and should be numbered consecutively in superscript and listed on a separate sheet at the end.
Please note: ‘Eds’ without point; ‘&’ for joint authors and in publishers’ names.
Examples
EMERSON, R. M., FRETZ, R. I. & SHAW, L. L. (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
GREEN, L. (2001) How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot: Ashgate.
HO, W-C. (2001) Musical learning: Differences between boys and girls in Hong Kong Chinese co-educational secondary schools. British Journal of Music Education, 18, 41–54.
KNUSSEN, S. (2003) Educational programmes. In C. Lawson (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra (pp. 239–250). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Illustrations and figures
All figures should be supplied as separate TIFF or EPS files. It is essential that JPEG files are greater than 320 dpi. All figures must be cited in the manuscript and each file clearly named. Figures must not be ‘pasted’ into the word file. Line artwork should be supplied in black and white mode at a resolution of 1200 dpi; combination artwork (line/tone) at a resolution of 800dpi; black and white halftone artwork should be saved in ‘greyscale’ mode at a resolution of 300dpi; colour halftone artwork should be saved in ‘CMYK’ mode for printing purposes and ‘RGB’ mode for web only files at a resolution of 400 dpi. Musical examples should be computer-processed wherever possible, but will be reset by the publishers if necessary.
If you request colour figures in the printed version, you will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.
6. Copyright
The policy of BJME is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant Cambridge University Press a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.