JOSÉ LUIS ARÓSTEGUI
University of Granada (Spain)
July 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (4): 90–109 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.4.90
Abstract: This article explores the ethical challenges faced by the Revista Internacional de Educación Musical (RIEM), a Spanish-language journal dedicated to music education research in the Ibero-American region. Established in 2013, RIEM encountered several ethical dilemmas during its first decade, including: creating a journal from scratch, managing Author Processing Charges versus free open access, navigating journal indexing, addressing language barriers, and grappling with the concept of science. These issues stem from economic pressures in academic publishing and the tension between acknowledging diversity and ensuring knowledge dissemination. The article concludes with political, economic, and personal reflections on academic journal management, highlighting broader concerns about equitable access to research dissemination and the complexities of navigating the global academic landscape.
Keywords: Academic publishing ethics, open access, Author Processing Charges (APCs), language equity
The ethics of authorship and editing in scholarly publishing encompass many responsibilities and challenges. From adhering to ethical standards, avoiding plagiarism and fabrication, to properly attributing authorship, to managing peer review, among others. In this paper, I discuss some of the ethical implications that I have faced during my time as Editor-in-Chief of Revista Internacional de Educación Musical (RIEM), a peer-reviewed Spanish-language journal operated by the International Society of Music Education (ISME) and published by Sage. I served in this position for ten years (2013–2023), the last three as co-editor with Guadalupe López Íñiguez and Rosa Serrano.
Given the personal approach I employ in this article,[1] it is important to mention my “I’s” (e.g., Peshkin 1988), i.e., those aspects of my identity that I am aware of and that have an influence on what I am going to say: (1) I am part of the Ibero-American and European communities; (2) English is not my first language; (3) I believe in social justice, in the welfare state, and in public services, in particular in the areas of health, education and social protection; and (4) I strongly believe that science, including social science, is a universal construction valid for any cultural setting—even if, in social science, such knowledge may be particular and far from “objective” and “neutral.” These elements, which make up who I am, influence the development of my arguments in this paper.
I structure my ethical issues as follows: (1) the implications of creating a journal; (2) the implications of the Authors Processing Charge (APC); (3) the implications of indexing journals; (4) the implications of the language of publication; and (5) the implications of science. While some of these topics have received extensive scholarly attention, others have emerged as particularly salient for RIEM due to its distinct positioning. In this paper, I focus on those issues most relevant to RIEM’s development and operations. To provide context for an international audience, I first outline the origins of RIEM before delving into these ethical issues.
While this discussion aims to address an international audience, the applicability of these insights may vary across different countries and settings. Nevertheless, there is a discernible trend in academic discourse to generalize the topics explored in this paper, often framing them as universally relevant despite distinct regional and cultural contexts. By examining these ethical issues through the lens of RIEM’s experiences, I expect to contribute insights relevant to journal editors, researchers, and policymakers navigating the evolving landscape of academic publishing. I highlight how seemingly technical decisions about journal management intersect with broader questions of equity, access, and the nature of scientific knowledge itself.
The Origins of RIEM
The Revista Internacional de Educación Musical was conceived by Gabriel Rusinek and me in response to a perceived gap in music education research within the Hispanic world. We identified two primary challenges: the language barrier for non-native English speakers and the lack of contextually relevant research for Hispanic settings at that time (c. 2010). These factors, combined with the scarcity of quality platforms for Spanish-language music education research, necessitated the creation of a dedicated journal.
RIEM was established as an open-access journal to overcome financial barriers faced by universities in countries with limited resources, as is the case in many of the Ibero-American[2] countries. The International Society of Music Education (ISME) provided crucial institutional support, aligning the Society’s mission with the journal’s goal of democratizing high-quality music education research. In 2011, the ISME board approved the proposal to create this new journal.
RIEM was launched in 2013 using an open-source PKP[3] platform, keeping production costs low at approximately €150 annually. With the acquisition of an ISSN, the initial infrastructure was set up without major difficulties. Forming the Editorial Board was relatively straightforward too, thanks to ISME’s network. The initial editorial board of RIEM featured scholars from diverse international backgrounds, albeit with an overrepresentation of Spanish academics. Over the years, concerted efforts have been made to diversify the board’s composition, aiming for a more balanced geographical representation to enhance the journal’s global perspective.
Establishing the editorial board and addressing technical aspects were the easy part in launching RIEM. The real challenge lay in attracting quality content for a new journal when scholars face pressure to publish in indexed journals with high impact factors. To address this, we employed strategies such as translating relevant articles from English and French and promoting special focus issues. Over time, the journal has seen a gradual increase in submissions, from twelve manuscripts received between 2011 and 2013, to forty in 2024 (source: RIEM), allowing for the publication of annual issues.
The indexation process proved to be another significant hurdle. We worked diligently to include RIEM in various databases, including Google Scholar, EBSCO, DOAJ, and JCR/Web of Science. Each acceptance required fulfilling specific technical and bibliographic requirements. The journal’s migration to Sage Publishers’ server in 2017 marked a significant milestone, enhancing its visibility and prestige, though it necessitated reconfiguring the platform settings.
Despite these challenges, RIEM has evolved into a reputable, open-access Spanish-language journal for music education research. It provides a platform for scholars to publish regardless of their economic circumstances, focuses on relevant local contexts, and eliminates language barriers for Spanish-speaking authors and readers. Serrano et al. (2025) edited a book in English to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal (2013–2023). The volume brings together a selection of essential articles from the journal, making this work available to an English-speaking audience.
1. The Ethical Implications of Creating a New Journal
The number of scientific journals has grown exponentially in recent decades. Jinha (2010) estimated that more than fifty million peer-reviewed articles were published by 2010. The average annual growth of the article stock between 1995 and 2007 was +2.5% (Origgi and Ramello 2015). In 2006, it was estimated that 1,350,000 articles were published in approximately 23,750 scientific journals (Björk et al. 2009). As for music education, a search in Scopus revealed the following number of papers indexed in this database: 292 in 2004, 703 in 2014, and 1946 in 2024.[4] As for the number of journals, I queried SJR/Scopus and found eight indexed in 2003, ten in 2013, and seventeen in 2023.[5] This represents the narrow count of journals explicitly focused on music education research. However, if journals that publish music education research papers in adjacent areas—such as music or education—are included, the estimated numbers expanded to approximately fifteen to twenty related journals indexed in Scopus in 2003, twenty five to thirty in 2013, and fifty to one hundred in 2023.[6]
In theory, starting a journal from scratch is easy these days. The open source digital tools of platforms like PKP make the process simple and inexpensive—even free if you are computer literate and have access to a hosting service from your university, for example. The main problem is how to get authors to submit their work to a new journal that, being new, does not meet the criteria for indexing in relevant databases. Many researchers know that writing a paper is a hard task and usually expect the journal to meet the requirements that universities and national quality assurance agencies demand so that the researcher’s work is recognized in their evaluations. This is one of the main reasons why most people prefer to publish in established journals rather than new ones, in addition to their larger audience and influence. As a result, bigger journals get bigger and smaller ones get even smaller or simply disappear, resulting in a concentration of knowledge publishing in a few hands and difficulties for independent voices.
When RIEM was first launched, we faced significant challenges because of journal concentration. It took three years for the journal to start receiving a steadily increasing number of submissions, eventually reaching a level sufficient to consistently publish an annual issue. Even after identifying a niche for the journal and overcoming expected barriers, such as financial and logistical challenges, establishing a peer review process, and ensuring quality control, the most significant challenges to launch RIEM ultimately stemmed from issues deeply tied to the economic competitiveness of academia and the pressures of accountability, common hurdles for any brand-new journal (Macheridis and Paulsson 2021).
With regard to the academic publishing industry, researchers are incentivized to publish in established journals with high impact factors due to their critical role in career advancement, funding opportunities, and institutional evaluations. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle, where new journals struggle to attract submissions because they lack the prestige and visibility of established outlets (de Camargo 2014).
As for the broader academic ecosystem, heightened accountability demands place increasing pressure on academics to document their productivity through quantifiable metrics such as publication counts, citations, and impact factors. This “audit culture” drives researchers toward established journals that are indexed in major databases and carry significant reputational weight. New journals often lack these features in their early stages, making them less appealing to authors who need to demonstrate measurable impact for career progression or funding applications (Macheridis and Paulsson 2021).
2. The Ethical Implications of Authors Processing Charge (APC)
Until recently, two primary business models for academic journals existed: subscription-based access, where individuals or institutions pay to read articles, and open access, where articles are freely available to everyone. In recent years, a third model has emerged where authors pay a fee to publish their work, known as the Article Processing Charge (APC). This new model now coexists with the previous two but has also transformed the subscription model into a hybrid approach. In this hybrid model, if an author pays the APC, their article is made freely accessible to all; if they do not, access remains restricted to subscribers. In the field of music education, ACT and RIEM are examples of fully open-access journals. Meanwhile, most other prominent journals in music education adopt the hybrid model. Some journals, such as Revista Electrónica de la Lista Europea de Música en la Educación (LEEME) and ArtsEduca, exclusively use the APC model.
The APC model is currently expanding, driven by policies from research funding and performing organizations. These organizations increasingly mandate that research funded by public grants must be published in open-access journals or platforms that comply with specific open-access requirements. For example, initiatives like Horizon Europe[7] and Plan S[8] require immediate open access to publicly funded research, either through open-access journals or repositories. In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has significantly boosted the push for open access, mandating all federally funded research to be made publicly accessible by the end of 2025.[9] The push for open access has significantly contributed to the growth of the APC model as a means to meet these mandates. And while it is certainly possible to find open-access journals that meet the quality standards required by funding institutions, the majority of prominent and influential journals in our field (and others) operate under a payment-based model.
RIEM opted for the free open access model for two reasons: first, because it would be like locking the stable door when the horse is already bolted to create a new journal to promote research production in a small field such as music education, even more so in Spanish, and then limit its access by imposing APCs or a paid subscription. Second, most of the Spanish-speaking countries in the American continent are part of the Purchasing Power Parity[10] tiers between 3 to 5 (out of 6), so the APC is unaffordable for most of the scholars and universities. While this is certainly true for any scholar even in a tier 1 context conducting research without financial support for publication as, for instance, Burchardt (2014) illustrated in the case of Denmark, the issue is even more pronounced in the other countries that RIEM serves.
APCs vary by journal. They range from a few hundred euros (or the corresponding currency) to many thousands, depending on the journal’s impact factor and prestige and the resulting higher demand for publication (Siler and Frenken 2020). Haustein et al. (2024) estimate that $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars, accounting for inflation) has been spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. This estimate included six publishers: Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley. After adjusting for inflation, these authors estimated that annual spending nearly tripled, from $910.3 million in 2019 to $2.538 billion in 2023.
Within the environment of scholarly need for publication, many predatory journals have flourished—that is, journals “charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not.”[11] In the narrow list of music education journals mentioned above, at least two—LEEME and ArtsEduca—can now be classified as predatory. The sale of these formerly respected and well-positioned journals to foreign entities has resulted in significant changes. Once focused primarily on high-quality Ibero American research, these journals now prioritize profit through increased APCs. Both previously operated as diamond open-access publications; now, ArtsEduca charges £2,000 per article and LEEME £2,500 under their new ownership. ArtsEduca in particular has been cited as an example of a journal exhibiting several questionable publication practices following its change in ownership (Cabezas-Clavijo 2023; Martín-Martín and Delgado 2025). These changes are not confined to these two journals. Similar trends are observed globally, with companies acquiring independent, well-regarded journals and transforming them into “paper mills” publishing low-quality or irrelevant articles to maximize revenue, as Cabezas-Clavijo et al. (2023) illustrate. The issue becomes even more pressing in the field of music education, where the already-limited number of specialized journals is further diminished by such unethical practices, compounded by the fact that some adjacent fields that occasionally publish music education research also feature journals flagged as predatory.[12]
3. The Ethical Implications of Journal Indexation
With the proliferation of journals, the need to assess their quality has become even greater. This is where scholarly databases come in, with indexing serving as a primary indicator of quality and legitimacy. As mentioned earlier, it is relatively easy to establish an electronic platform to create a journal. Indexing helps researchers identify reputable journals and also ensures that published work reaches a wider audience through increased visibility and discoverability. Thus, the inclusion of a journal in prestigious databases can significantly enhance its reputation and influence.
However, the reliance on indexing to evaluate journal quality has ethical and practical implications. The dominance of private indexing databases creates barriers for smaller or regionally focused journals, which may struggle to meet inclusion criteria despite maintaining rigorous editorial standards. For instance, music education journals often face challenges due to the niche nature of the field, which limits citation potential and international reach—two key metrics used by indexing services. This bias can marginalize valuable research communities and concentrate academic influence within a small number of well-established journals.
The quantitative focus of many indexing systems—such as impact factors—can incentivize practices that prioritize metrics over meaningful scholarship.[13] If this article had been written a decade or so ago, the discussion might have critiqued the quantitative approach to indexing because of oversimplification and distortion of the evaluation of scholarly work, prioritizing numerical indicators over meaningful intellectual contributions and ethical considerations in academic publishing (see Smeyers and Burbules 2011). Today, this battle has been lost, in part because the impact factor has been adopted as a way to quickly and easily evaluate papers and journals, and in part because national quality assurance agencies have begun to incorporate qualitative criteria for evaluating research production, in line with the DORA[14] and Leiden[15] Manifestos. In any case, the quantitative approach to determining the quality of journals remains, as does the enormous power of such databases. In our field, Journal Citation Report (JCR) from Web of Science and SCImago Journal Report (SJR) from Scopus have become critical actors in determining the impact of journals and, consequently, the papers they published.
Actors involved in the publication process have ethical implications related indexation. Therefore, it is the responsibility of authors not to manipulate journal indices by self-citation or by exchanging citations with other colleagues (Hugget 2013). Editors, for their part, should avoid stimulating the citation of references from the same journal in which they are trying to publish (Foo 2013) and give space to new authors, even if they are likely to be less cited than senior authors (Randell-Moon et al. 2011). As for citation databases, norms should be implemented to prevent the abuse of power in journal inclusion decisions (Masic et al. 2022), because, as these authors claim, “any power that is not controlled is eventually abused” (249)—as seems to be the case with the two medical journals reported in their article and rejected from indexing because they were labeled as “local” and even “parochial.”
This last situation is very similar to what we experienced with RIEM. Our application for inclusion in a relevant database was not accepted:
The title mentioned above has been evaluated for inclusion in *** by the Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB). The review of this title is now complete and the CSAB has advised to not accept the title for *** inclusion at the present time. For your information, the reviewer comments are copied below:
+ The abstracts are in keeping with *** English Language requirements.
+ In general, the content of the articles is consistent with the scope and aims of the journal.
– The geographical reach of authorship and/or content is too limited.
– The journal shows an uneven scholarly quality in the articles, indicating that peer review and editorial management need to be strengthened.
– The journal does not publish enough good articles each year to warrant inclusion in ***.
– Low citations in good journals indexed in ***
– The composition of the Editorial Board is too institution/nationally focused for a global reach.
– Many good international journals already cover this subject area.
– Journal title implies that it is international but this is not supported by the stated aims and scope.
For future resubmission, the journal needs to increase substantially its international scope in terms of authorship and academic impact. You may consider publishing more papers in English and seeking more high impact authors from outside your existing countries or sources of authorship. It will also help if published papers cover a broader range of research topics and issues that may speak directly to an international audience.
As someone familiar with this process in my former role as Editor of RIEM, I see at least three biases in this response:
- Subject area bias. RIEM is dedicated to music education research, a small field in social and educational sciences, which makes it difficult to attain a substantial amount of citations due to the size of our community. It is also not accurate to claim that many international journals cover the field of music education. Furthermore, the existence of other journals in the field should not be considered a disqualifying factor, as it is not a criterion for assessing the quality of a journal.
- Geographic bias. RIEM is considered “local” and not international because the authors of the papers are mainly from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Chile and Spain. Are Argentina or Mexico not as international as the United States or China? What does the CSAB mean by “international”?
- Language bias. The language of the journal is Spanish, but the recommendation is to publish more in English—even though the same database already includes more than 300 journals in Spanish, 120 in Portuguese and twenty in German, among other languages.
The editors of RIEM submitted a response to the CSAB for its decision, pointing out comments we found offensive, particularly the claim that the journal needed to strengthen its peer review and editorial management. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), RIEM ensures a transparent peer review process and upholds rigorous editorial standards, as evidenced by its eighty percent rejection rate. Despite these efforts, we were informed that the decisions of the CSAB are final and will not be reconsidered.
RIEM is not the only journal that has experienced such unfair situations. The aforementioned decision is in line with the case reported above by Masic et al. (2022), and with the concern expressed by the editors of twelve Chilean journals about indexing because they are located in the “semi-periphery” of the scientific world (Koch and Vanderstraeten 2021). This is what happens when “any power that is not controlled is eventually abused” or, to use my own words, when public institutions do not regulate the private sector with so much influence in such critical areas as research and higher education.
4. The Ethical Implications of the Language of Publication
Of the 1946 music education articles indexed in Scopus in 2024, 1812 were in English, forty-eight in Spanish and twenty-eight in Korean, with other languages having even fewer papers included in the database. This serves as a clear example of how English has become the lingua franca in science and many other fields. Scholars whose native language is English have an advantage over those who use it as a second language, not to mention those who do not speak it. Fluency in English is so important in some discplines, such as physics or chemistry, that it is simply impossible to find journals in other languages. In these and other areas, language might pose a minor problem because the knowledge can be considered universal. However, when discussing a specific context that requires good skills to write thick descriptions and narratives, fluency in that language can turn out to be a major problem for both the writer and the journal editor who has to make a decision on that paper.
As mentioned in the first section of this article, language equity is one of the reasons that led ISME to create RIEM. It is a way to promote the production of research in the areas where Spanish is spoken, and to facilitate its dissemination. What happens in Yucatán or Eastern Andalusia can be just as relevant and in need of research as in Victoria or the Midwest. Supporting the production of research in other languages means democratizing science, in that it makes it easier for researchers to produce work in their own language and to have it read by local readers.
I am aware that this argument can be turned around: any scholar should have access to what is going on anywhere in the world. Even more, it could be argued that Spanish is another hegemonic language that limits the spread of other languages: from Aymara to Basque to Mayan to Quechua, and so on. This position would lead to an atomization of the community, which would prevent the spread of knowledge. And the argument that Spanish, along with Portuguese, functions as a lingua franca for all these linguistic communities could also apply to the case of English.
In order to find a balance between both sides, a twofold strategy could be followed. First, the scholarly community could promote journals in different languages—or at least in the “world languages” (Ammon 2010), of which two Western languages (English and Spanish) and two Eastern languages (Chinese and Arabic) have become hegemonic and global (Al-Salman 2007). Second, policies in English-language journals could be implemented that are friendly to those authors who use English as a second language, which is not always the case at present. RIEM was created with the first strategy in mind. The number of journals specifically dedicated to music education research is very small, and even fewer accept papers in Spanish. To the best of my knowledge ArtsEduca, LEEME and Revista Electrónica Complutense de Educación Musical (RECIEM) are the only other music education research journals that publish in Spanish.[16] However, LEEME and ArtsEduca recently became predatory.
5. The Ethical Implications of Science
I would like to discuss—briefly—whether the concept of science is universal or a Western construction. This is an important question for editors-in-chief, even though the aim and scope are clearly stated. This is at least the situation I had to face when I was RIEM editor. I rejected a paper as editor because I did not consider the content scientific. The author complained that I was being colonialist and disregarding the knowledge of her ancestors from an Indigenous community in the Americas. I was convinced that I was right, but at the same time I was shocked by her reaction. Was I unconsciously colonialist in supporting a concept of science based on the scientific method rather than on beliefs, as I thought this author did? In other words, is science universal or is it a consequence of Western culture, which consequently undervalues other knowledge from other cultures that academic journals limit?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines science as “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.”[17] This definition clearly has in mind the current concept of science developed in the West, but it can cover ancient knowledge from Egypt, China, Maya, the Islamic world, Mesopotamia or India. Today, access to science is possible in every country in the world, though not on equal terms. However, it could be argued that researchers are applying Western methods. The case of China is a good illustration in this regard, as it has become a global leader in research and development, producing a significant volume of publications and becoming a major contributor to fields like artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and renewable energy. This progress has been built on frameworks established by Western science, such as the adoption of the scientific method, peer-reviewed publishing systems, and English as the dominant language for scholarly communication (Li and Yang 2019) to gain international recognition and adhere to metrics like impact factors, which are rooted in Western academic traditions.
There is no consensus in the academy on what should be understood as science or, at the very least, social science. While some argued for the universality of science based on its epistemic foundations and global cultural roots (Czarnocka 2019; Paty 2001), others criticize this view, highlighting the influence of Western paradigms and the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge (Elshakry 2010; Putawa 2024). And in what could be considered postmodern paradigms of science, such as gender studies (e.g., Löwy 2000) or decolonialism (Grosfoguel 2012), there is a denial that science is universal, as its claim to objectivity and universality is not true, but here the debate would derive to epistemological issues about what we define as science, which is part of the current discussion about an agreed concept of science in evolution.
This is not the place to develop these ideas in depth, but it is to raise that editors-in-chief have a great responsibility in issues that are perhaps taken for granted. In the case I shared earlier, I realized that I consider science to be universal—even though the current institutionalization and practice of science have been heavily influenced by Western cultural values and norms, and even though the principles of observation, experimentation, and rational inquiry have been present in different cultures throughout history. So I stood by my decision not to accept the manuscript for submission to the reviewers, although I sent a thorough review in which I tried to explain why I did not find the content adequate. The author appreciated the explanation.
In addition to this question of addressing knowledge from cultures potentially excluded from mainstream science, editors have also to be vigilant about the surge of fake news, hoaxes about topics (e.g., vaccines), and content generated by artificial intelligence software. The challenge lies in balancing these dual responsibilities: safeguarding the integrity of science while remaining open to alternative perspectives that may enrich global knowledge systems. This dual vigilance is essential in an era where misinformation and cultural marginalization threaten both the credibility and inclusivity of academic publishing.
Final Remarks
The origins of Revista Internacional de Educación Musical stem from a recognized need to promote high-quality music education research in Spanish-speaking contexts. As an open-access journal, it also aims to democratize knowledge production and dissemination in the field. However, this mission also surfaced complex ethical dilemmas related to language, geographic representation, and conceptions of scientific validity. From the prior discussion, I would draw four lessons about the ethical implications of editing an academic journal based on my experience with RIEM and further discussion in the preceding pages: one economic, two political, and one personal.
In terms of economic motivations, it is possible to observe how economic forces have shaped the world of scholarly publishing. The pursuit of profit has led to the emergence of commercial publishers, who often charge substantial fees for article processing or subscriptions. This can create financial barriers for researchers, especially those from developing countries or smaller institutions. This is why many scholars (e.g., Peterson et al. 2013; Limaye 2022) argue that an APC-based open access publishing model is not sustainable, as it is leading to increased publishing costs that are burdening individual research groups and creating additional barriers for authors from less wealthy institutions or countries. This can lead to problems such as publication bias, the proliferation of predatory journals and, in extreme cases, fraudulent practices like manipulating peer review processes and selling authorship positions on pre-approved papers.[18] Such phenomena not only erode scientific integrity but also impose significant financial burdens on researchers. In addition, the pressure to publish in high-impact journals, which often have high APCs, can incentivize researchers to prioritize quantity over quality. Meanwhile, authors, reviewers, and most of the editors are working for free just to get their research done and keep their jobs.
It is difficult to escape this pressure of commodification, but many initiatives are moving away from this, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative[19] or the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.[20] There are at least organizations like ISME or the Mayday Group, among many others, that support journals like RIEM or ACT, which are making an important contribution in this regard. However, the wave moving in the opposite direction is even stronger, as clearly illustrated by the cases of ArtsE-duca and LEEME.
As for the political lessons behind the ethical implications for journal editors, there are at least two. The first is the blatant domination of the private sector in the management and regulation of research production in the world, without the control of any public institution, when it should be quite the opposite, especially when public funding of research is much higher than private. Scientific database companies have enormous power, as indexing has become one, and perhaps the main, cornerstone of the current system of research evaluation. An international public database is needed, but not many efforts have been made in this direction. To my knowledge, only the Open Research Europe initiative, launched by the European Commission in 2020, considered such a possibility. In the end, it became a centralized repository for open access research. An indexing database owned by an international non-profit organization is essential.
The second political lesson that can be drawn from the previous discussion is that the creation of journals should also take into account social issues, such as the promotion of research in less developed areas. The promotion of research in other languages is a way to facilitate the process for researchers from these regions. It is with this intention that RIEM was born. Science is not neutral, and this social issue cannot be ignored. The opposite implies a concentration of knowledge in the hands of those who already possess it and the condemnation of the rest of the world to exclusion and dependence. The ruthless competitiveness of the market makes it very difficult to achieve these goals.
And finally, a personal, postcolonial reflection. RIEM was created to promote research and its dissemination in a language other than English. In part, its purpose is to counter the hegemony of research from the anglophone world by providing a space for another community, the Ibero-American. This intention was postcolonial in itself. Or was it just an attempt to replace one hegemony with another, albeit lighter than the current one? I am convinced that the situation reported with a colleague and her denunciation of colonialism was not true, but it should make us think and review what we believe, because it can be discriminatory, even if unintentional. For some people, I may be colonialist, for others the opposite. And maybe they are both right.
What I know for sure is that in this global world there must be space for diversity and, at the same time, for unity. In this paradox, we live between the tyranny of homogeneity (e.g., Gaus 2016), against which we must seriously defend diversity, and the trap of heterogeneity (e.g., Bernabé 2018). For me, the last ethical lesson I revisited is the importance of continually questioning and re-evaluating what we hold to be true.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Roger Mantie and Alex Ruthmann for their valuable feedback on the content and editing of the text.
About the Author
José Luis Aróstegui is a Professor of Music Education at the University of Granada, Spain and the PI of the SEJ-540 research lab in music education. He earned his PhD in Education from the University of Granada in 2000, following which he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois (2001–2003). His research focuses on music education policy, curriculum development, and teacher education, with particular emphasis on the socioeconomic factors influencing educational reform. He has led numerous research projects, including the current R&D project on “Transversality, Creativity and Inclusion in School Music Projects” (2022–2026)—as PI 1. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Revista Internacional de Educación Musical (RIEM) from 2013 to 2023 and has been a member of the editorial board for several prestigious journals. His international contributions to music education include serving as a Commissioner (2004–2010) and Chair (2008–2010) of the ISME Music in Schools and Teacher Education Commission (MISTEC) and as a board member of the International Society for Music Education (2012–2016). José Luis was on residence at the University of Miami thanks to the grant awarded by the Fulbright Commission (January–April 2025).
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Notes
[1] This article was completed during a research stay at the University of Miami, courtesy of a Fulbright scholarship.
[2] Ibero-America is the region in the Americas where Spanish or Portuguese are the predominant languages. This includes all Hispanic American countries in North, Central, and South America, as well as the Hispanophone Caribbean and Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Andorra, Portugal and Spain are likewise included (for 22 countries in total). Further information at https://www.segib.org/en/who-we-are/.
[3] Public Knowledge Project. https://pkp.sfu.ca/
[4] I carried out this search by using the following command: TITLE-ABS-KEY ((“education” AND “music”) OR “music education”) AND PUBYEAR = 2004
[5] I used the Scimago Journal & Country Rank website (https://www.scimagojr.com/) to filter journals within the Social Sciences subject area, specifically in the Education category. I searched for journals tagged with the word ‘music,’ selected the type ‘journal,’ and retrieved data from 2023 (the latest available metrics). I repeated this process for 2013 and 2003 to compare results across these years.
[6] Estimation made by using Chat-GPT 4.0.
[7] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en
[8] https://www.coalition-s.org/
[9] https://council.science/blog/communicating-science-the-push-for-open-access/
[10] PPP is an internationally recognized method of ranking countries based on the real purchasing power of their currency and standard of living. Learn more at https://www.investopedia.com/updates/purchasing-power-parity-ppp/
[11] https://predatoryjournals.org/. This and other websites provide a list of publishers and journals considered as predatory, some of them owned by well-established publishers.
[12] Further information can be found at https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-01-31/a-shady-business-operated-out-of-a-british-mansion-is-buying-up-scientific-journals-to-earn-millions-by-publishing-mediocre-studies.html
[13] A recent and extreme case illustrating this issue can be found in the case of Juan Manuel Corchado, a professor and currently Rector at the University of Salamanca, Spain. He was accused of artificially inflating his academic impact through thousands of self-citations in his papers and conference presentations, as well as leveraging his role as editor of the journal Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal (ADCAIJ) to boost both his own citation metrics and those of the journal. More information at https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-04-26/the-seven-lies-of-the-ai-expert-who-cited-himself-thousands-of-times-on-scientific-papers.html
[15] http://www.leidenmanifesto.org/
[16] The list could be expanded to include music journals and also educational journals that accept papers in music education. Revista Musical Chilena Música Hodie and Resonancias are examples of music-related journals that pay attention to music education and accept papers in Spanish.
[17] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science
[18] https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/vende-paper-2-000-dolares-mercado-negro-textos-academicos-dana-credibilidad-ciencia_1_10384223.html Information only in Spanish.
[19] https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/
[20] https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration