The Music Education Editors' Circle is a global, collegial community of current and former editors across the full spectrum of peer-reviewed music education journals. We share knowledge, mentor the next generation of editors and reviewers, and maintain an open record of our field's scholarly journals.
The Circle began with the inaugural panel symposium of music education journal editors at the ISME World Conference, and continues to meet at ISME and other venues. It is independent of any single journal or publisher. We welcome editors across languages, regions, publishing models, and the full spectrum from specialized research journals to practitioner-scholar journals.
A community of editors, caring together for the craft and ethics of the work.
We work across journals, languages, and regions as colleagues with a shared interest in the health of the field — not as competitors.
Our conversations follow Chatham House norms. Manuscript content and author or reviewer identities are never shared in Circle spaces.
We favor open, well-documented editorial policy and process, and we keep our shared records public and correctable.
We actively include journals and editors working in many languages and regions, and we attend to barriers such as APCs and access.
Supporting new editors, reviewers, and authors is treated as a shared professional responsibility.
We support sound, ethical scholarship and surface documented integrity concerns responsibly, always attributed to their source.
A small founding group stewarding the Circle until a fuller governance structure is formalized.
The Circle is currently coordinated by an interim steering group drawn from those who have been most active in convening the community. This group is provisional: it exists to get the Circle established, and we expect to formalize governance — membership, terms, and decision-making — collectively as the Circle matures. The group is open to additional members; editors interested in helping steer the Circle are warmly invited to be in touch via the list.
Steering group membership to be confirmed.
Beyond the steering group, the Circle maintains an open directory of the editors who have shaped our journals — current, past, and in memoriam — listing editorial roles and affiliations only, with no personal contact details. Browse the full members directory →
The working policies that govern participation, data, and conduct in the Circle.
Circle discussions — on the list and in meetings — operate under Chatham House norms: participants may use the information received, but neither the identity nor affiliation of speakers may be revealed. Manuscript content and the identities of authors and reviewers are never shared in Circle spaces. Posts should be collegial, relevant to music education editing, and respectful of members' time and contexts; promotional content, off-topic posts, and anything that could put a colleague at risk are not permitted.
Our public datasets — the journals directory, editorial histories, and integrity reference — list editorial roles, affiliations, and published record only. We do not publish personal contact details; editors are reached collegially via the list. Open data on this site is shared under CC BY-NC 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial), and each downloadable file carries an attribution field. Corrections are welcome and acted on promptly.
We maintain a research-integrity reference of documented retractions and authority-flagged venues. Every flag is attributed to the authority that issued it; the Circle does not publish original accusations. See also our curated resources and editorials on publishing ethics, including the MayDay/ACT special issue on the ethics of authorship, reviewership, and editorship.
Membership is open to current, incoming, and past editors, associate and section editors, and editorial board members in music education. You can join the announcements list with any email address via groups.io/g/muec.