About the Journal

The Journal

Culture & Musées, created in 2003, is an international double-blind, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing new research on cultural institutions, audiences and mediation. The Journal aims at a wide readership of researchers, students as well as museum and cultural heritage professionals.

The journal is managed by editor Isabelle Brianso (University of Avignon), editors-in-chief Éric Triquet (University of Avignon) and Dominique Poulot (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), assistant editor-in-chief (Florence Andreacola, Grenoble Alpes University), a panel of peer reviewers, an editorial board, and an international steering committee.

The journal is supported by Avignon Université and UGA Éditions. Culture & Musées is published with the support of France’s Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction générale des patrimoines – département de la politique des publics, and Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

For 2018-2020, it was awarded the support of the Institut des Sciences Humaines (Institute for Social Sciences) within the CNRS.

Culture & Musées has an international scope: the journal has been indexed by the INIST and Arts and Humanities Citation Index & Current Contents databases, as well as the Arts and Humanities (Thomson Reuters) since 2010. Culture & Musées is also indexed by the HCERES and the French 71st CNU section (Information and Communication Sciences).

Academic Mission

The Journal was established in the context of close collaboration between researchers in sociology, psychology, art history, semiology, linguistics and philosophy, and a growing interest from the museum community in audience evaluation studies. For founders Jean Davallon and Hana Gottesdiener, the challenge of creating a scientific journal of museology was then to offer researchers and practitioners support for research dissemination in a French-language journal; in this perspective, the journal’s creation was regarded as a decisive landmark in structuring museology as a scientific discipline. The first issue of Publics & Musées was thus published in 1992 and another eighteen issues followed. By 2002, a decision was made to widen the Journal’s perspective on institutions, audiences and evaluation tools for museums and cultural heritage, to encompass other areas of culture: heritage, tourism, literature, cinema, the arts, science, history and other cultural practices. Publics & Musées then became Culture & Musées.

Following a historic partnership between the University of Avignon and Actes Sud publishing house, Culture & Musées decided to change over to a purely digital format starting in 2017, and has been published on OpenEdition, an open access academic platform for research in the humanities and social sciences, via the Freemium program since 2018.

Editorial Policy

The Journal’s Composition

Each issue is devoted to one theme or issue. This topic is chosen by the editorial committee on the basis of a call for papers it has issued or at the initiative of one or two research fellows that take on the project until publication. These contributions are then submitted for double-blind peer review.

Culture & Musées also publishes articles not directly related to the issue’s featured topic in the section Varia (Miscellany). These articles are also submitted for double-blind peer review and fall under the purview of the editorial team.

In addition to the Varia (Miscellany), other sections accompany the thematic articles:

  • Expériences et points de vue (Experiences and Viewpoints) gathers reports on finalized projects, summaries of financed studies as well as outlooks on current affairs concerning the field of museology.

  • Études et notes de recherche (Current Studies and Papers) is a collection of summaries of doctoral theses (long form), as well as Master’s level research, concerning museology. Reports of ongoing and upcoming work can also be included in this section.

  • Lectures (Reviews) presents synopses of publications on museums, culture, audiences and cultural heritage.

  • Visites d’exposition (Exhibition Tours). The articles included in this section are written in the form of an exhibition review from a museological point of view.

As opposed to articles in the featured topic section and the Varia (Miscellany), those submitted to the above sections are not subject to double-blind peer review, but rather reviewed and monitored by the journal editorial team.

Evaluation

Articles submitted to the featured topic section on the issue’s theme and the Varia (Miscellany) section are subject to double-blind peer review. The editors of the journal submit them anonymously to reviewers, whose (anonymous) reports are then sent on to the guest editors who transmit them to the authors for revision. Each successive version of each article is managed by the guest editors and the editors of the journal. Varia (Miscellany) articles are under the sole oversight of the journal’s editors. Final decisions following revisions are taken jointly between guest editors and the editorial team.