About the Journal

FOCUS AND SCOPE

The Journal of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music (JISOCM, founded in 2014) welcomes original research articles, review articles, conference papers revised into articles, and reviews that focus on a wide variety of aspects of Eastern Orthodox and related chant traditions, both monophonic and polyphonic, written from a range of musicological, theological, compositional and practical perspectives. 

The JISOCM incorporates the Proceedings of the Conferences of the ISOCM, making it thereby not only the Society’s only publication channel, but one of the main venues for publishing on Orthodox church music in the world. Papers presented in other conferences that focus on Orthodox church music may also be published as part of the Journal. Books and recordings will also be reviewed. The Journal commemorates scholars, composers, and practical church musicians by publishing obituaries. The Journal also publishes theme issues.

The JISOCM publishes one–two issues per year.

In the classification of publication channels in Finland, the JISOCM is on level 1 (2019). As of January 2022, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies has granted the JISOCM the right to use its label for peer-reviewed scholarly publications.

LANGUAGE

​The language of the journal is English, but submissions in other languages will be considered for publication. 

PEER REVIEW POLICY

The JISOCM accepts original manuscripts that have not been published earlier in any form or language, or submitted for review in another publishing forum.

The manuscripts submitted for peer review will undergo a rigorous double blind peer-review process. The appropriateness of the manuscript for the Jourmal is first evaluated by the editorial board. The editors consider the content, clarity of style, and bibliographic and formatting criteria. If the manuscript does not adhere to the editorial guidelines of the Journal, it may be rejected or returned to the author for corrections.

The double blind review process takes place on the Journal's electronic platform. Two specialists of the research field in question will be invited to assess the scientific quality of the manuscript. The reviewers are PhD level researchers or other expert parties external to the editorial board and independent in relation to the manuscript to be reviewed. The review process is carried out anonymously.

The reviewing process will focus on the comprehensiveness of the material and the mastering of the theoretical framework, reliability and accuracy of the research implementation as well as the originality and novelty of the research problem or and the results in relation to earlier research. The reviewers submit their evaluation in the form of a written review, indicating their recommendation of the acceptance, conditional acceptance (requiring revisions, requiring another round of review), or rejection of the submission. If the recommendations vary considerably, a third reviewer will be assigned. The peer-review process takes approximately three–five months.

The editors will send the written reviews, complemented with their own comments, to the author(s). The author is expected to revise the manuscript on the basis of the reviews and the editors' comments. The author is expected to send a revised manuscript and a list of notes (or a commented text file) on how the reviewers' requests have been met. If necessary, the manuscript will undergo a second round of evaluation. The final decision of acceptance is made by the editorial board.

The documentation of the peer-review process will be stored in the Journal's editorial system at Journal.fi for fifteen years.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

The JISOCM is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. The Journal has signed the BOAI declaration and is committed to its aims. There are no article processing charges or any other charges for the publication.

RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH

The JISOCM is committed to upholding and promoting the highest standards in research publication ethics and the guidelines for responsible conduct of research, published by the Advisory Board of Research Integrity in Finland. The Journal expects the authors, reviewers, and editors to observe the following principles:

  • Conducting research and recording, presenting, and evaluating research results aim at promoting research integrity, meticulousness, and accuracy.
  • Methods applied for data acquisition, as well as for research and evaluation, conform to scientific criteria and are ethically sustainable. When publishing the research results, they are communicated in an open and responsible fashion.
  • Researcher takes due account of the work and achievements of other researchers by respecting their work, citing their publications appropriately, and by giving their achievements the credit and weight they deserve in carrying out the researcher's own research and publishing its results.
  • Necessary research permits have been acquired. The researcher is recommended to familiarize with the European General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, in relation to scientific research.
  • Sources of financing, conflicts of interest or other commitments relevant to the conduct of research are reported when publishing the research results.
  • Reviewer refrains from all research-related evaluation and decision-making, when there is reason to suspect a conflict of interest. 

Violations of the responsible conduct of research, if not corrected upon notice, will eventually lead to the rejection of the manuscript. These may include research misconduct and disregard for the responsible conduct of research that may occur in planning and performing the research and in presenting the research results and conclusions, such as:

  • Fabrication: reporting intended observations which have not been made by using the methods as claimed in the research report, or presenting invented results in research report.
  • Falsification (misrepresentation): modifying, selecting, or presenting original observations deliberately so that the results based on those observations are distorted; it also refers to the omission of results or information that are essential for the conclusions.
  • Plagiarism, or unacknowledged borrowing: representing another person's material as one's own without appropriate references, for example, manuscripts, articles, other texts or parts of them, visual materials (photos, scores), translations. Plagiarism includes direct copying as well as adapted copying. 
  • Misappropriation: unlawful presentation of another person's result, idea, plan, observation or data as one's own research.
  • Denigrating the role of other researchers in publications: neglecting to mention them, referring to earlier research results inadequately or inappropriately.
  • Carelessness in reporting research results and methods, resulting in misleading claims.
  • Self-plagiarism: publishing the same research results multiple times as new and novel results.
  • Manipulating authorship: including in the list of authors persons who have not participated in the research, or taking credit for work produced by what is referred to as ghost authors.
  • Exaggerating one's own scientific and scholarly achievements.
  • Expanding the bibliography of a study to artificially increase the number of citations.
  • Delaying the work of another researcher, for example, through peer reviewing.

LICENSING AND COPYRIGHT

The Journal content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. 

The author holds the copyright of their article without restrictions.