About the Journal

Focus and Scope

MMD – Museum, Materials and Discussions. Journal of Museum Studies is an open-access academic journal in English, French, and Italian, devoted to museology, museography, Cultural Heritage as well as research on audiences and fruition with an international outlook, addressing both the life of museum institutions and collections, and the latest challenges they face in their broad cultural and social dimension. 

MMD – Museum, Materials and Discussions. Journal of Museum Studies aims at promoting and enhancing the collaboration among researchers from the field of humanities, social sciences, architecture, and Digital Humanities through their complementary perspectives. It is addressed to scholars, students and professionals working in these specific disciplinary fields, but also readers interested in the current evolution of the debate on issues, methods and tools related to the material and immaterial aspects of museology in its relation to history and contemporaneity, and in connection with the progress of public welfare.

Section Policies

Dossier

Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

Each issue revolves around a given topic or methodological issue; each dossier has its own guest editor chosen by the Direction and the Scientific Board, which guarantees its scientific and thematic coherence from an international call.

Sections

Sections are organized by the Editorial Board in cooperation with the editors of individual issues and/or the editorship. Each section is developed from a case study/the contribution of a specialist in the field/an interview, etc., introduced by the editorial manager. They may include, for instance, individual or collective reports written by museum professionals on Italian and international cases, but also critical analyses related to visits to relevant exhibitions or archaeological and landscape sites.

Privileged themes in the sections:

Experience and Publics Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

Digital Technologies for Cultural Heritage Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

Architecture and Displays Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

Behind the scenes Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

Materials Submissions welcome / Peer Reviewed

This last section may comprise free peer-reviewed contributions dedicated to museums, collections and exhibitions and is intended to create space for works by young scholars.

Duties for the Guest Editors

Guest editors are expected to:

  • Select the articles to be published in the Dossier, in agreement with the Direction and Scientific Board of the journal;

  • Keep contact with the authors during all phases of editing and reviewing the essays;

  • Select reviewers for the peer review of the essays, in agreement with the Scientific Board of the journal;

  • Contact reviewers and submit the essays for peer review;

  • Check the compliance of the essays with the policy of the journal, following the changes made by the authors after the peer review;

  • Collect signed releases from the authors of the essays;

  • Delivery releases to the Direction and Scientific Board of the journal.

If deemed appropriate, guest editors may also enlist the assistance of trusted editorial collaborators, related to the specific theme of the journal issue, whose contribution will be indicated in the colophon of the journal issue in question.

Peer Review Process

All published articles are subjected to the double-blind peer-review process. The procedures are formalized to ensure transparency, reviewers’ autonomy, and the absence of conflicts of interest. Upon receiving an article, the Editorial team of the Journal evaluates its suitability for review. As part of the initial quality assessment, each article will undergo plagiarism detection through iThenticate. After this formal assessment, if deemed suitable, the submitted article is anonymously sent to two external reviewers selected on the basis of their expertise in the subject under consideration. Once the reviewers’ feedback is received, authors are required to revise or complete the manuscript based on the received instructions and within the deadlines indicated by Editorial team. After this step, the text is considered finalized, and the drafts will undergo a purely editorial review by Editorial team. In exceptional cases, the Direction may take responsibility for publication regardless of the peer-review process, and indicating this in the body of the article.

Publication Frequency

The journal publishes two issues per year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

It releases its articles under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contributions. The works must be properly attributed to its author(s). It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author(s) or journal board, although you are kindly requested to inform the journal for every reuse of the papers.

Authors who publish on this journal maintain the copyrights.

Publication Fees

The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Ethics

MMD – Museum, Materials and Discussions. Journal of Museum Studies adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics.

The code is inspired by the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular to the COPE Core Practices and its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

All parties involved in the editorial process, editorial staff members, authors, reviewers must know and apply the ethical principles of that document.

Data Policy

When relevant, authors are encouraged to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated to their articles in trusted data repositories, according to the international best practices and data management guidelines.

Detailed information is reported in the AlmaDL Journals Data Policy.

Authors who are affiliated to the University of Bologna can publish their data in AMSActa, the institutional research data repository.

Indexing and abstracting

The Journal is indexed in the following databases and search engines:

  • ACNP – Italian Catalogue of Serials
  • BASE – Bielefield Academic Search Engine
  • Google Scholar – Academic search engine
  • Ulrich’s – Global Serials Directory
  • Worldcat – The world’s largest library catalog

Archiving Policy

As part of AlmaDL Journals, the Journal adopts a strategy to ensure long term preservation of the published content. Please see the archiving policy of the publishing service AlmaDL Journals.

Publisher

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
Alma Diamond – open scholarly communication

Via Zamboni 33,
40126 - Bologna (Italy)

Ownership

Dipartimento delle Arti – DAR
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
via Barberia 4
40123 - Bologna (Italy)