De Musica Disserenda

About De Musica Disserenda

De Musica Disserenda — Profile and Publishing Guide

De Musica Disserenda is a Slovenian scholarly journal of musicology, published since 2005 by the Institute of Musicology of ZRC SAZU — the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts — in Ljubljana, with ZRC SAZU's publishing house, Založba ZRC, recorded as publisher in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Its print ISSN is 1854-3405 and its electronic ISSN is 2536-2615. The Latin title, which might be rendered as On Discussing Music, announces a journal of scholarly argument about music: its history, its culture, its theory and its analysis. DOAJ's keyword record for the journal lists exactly those territories — history of music, music culture, music analysis, music theory, musicology and cultural history — and its subject classification spans Music, Literature on music, and Musical instruction and study.

The stored Journals World record that this profile replaces named the publisher only as a garbled numeric code and compressed the journal into a handful of template lines. The verified picture is richer. The Institute of Musicology's own institutional history states that since 2005 the Institute has published a new scholarly journal, De musica disserenda — a journal created as the publishing arm of one of Central Europe's established musicological institutes, whose researchers have catalogued musical sources for the international RISM inventory since 1993 and have maintained the Slovenian national contribution to the RILM bibliography of music literature for decades. Articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.3986, the journal is fully open access without author charges, and it publishes in an unusually wide set of languages for a national institute journal: Slovenian, English, German, French and Italian, per its DOAJ record.

At a Glance

Scope: Musicology in the Full Sense

A journal whose keywords run from the history of music through music analysis and theory to cultural history is making a claim about what musicology is: not a single method but a family of them, united by disciplined attention to music as document, as structure and as social fact. The journal's published record bears that out. Its volumes carry source studies of early music and of musical manuscripts, analyses of individual works and repertoires, studies of music iconography — the depiction of music and instruments in visual art — organological work on historical instruments, and cultural-historical studies of music in Slovenia, in the former Yugoslav space and in wider Europe. A study of turqueries with musical symbols in Slovenian collections, an examination of early vihuela construction and its implications for modern reproduction, and work on nineteenth-century discourses of nation in the music of Slavic Central Europe are all characteristic: precise about sources, explicit about method, and alert to what musical evidence can say about the cultures that produced it.

For prospective authors, the scope has a practical shape. Historical musicology grounded in primary sources is the journal's home ground. Music theory and analysis are welcome where they engage repertoire and history rather than floating free of them. Ethnomusicological and cultural-historical approaches appear where they share the journal's evidentiary standards. Slovenian and Central European topics receive expert, sympathetic reading here — the editorial environment knows these archives and literatures at first hand — but the journal is not parochial: its five-language policy and its international contributors make it a European musicology journal published from Ljubljana, not a local bulletin. Manuscripts should be written accordingly: full scholarly apparatus, sources identified precisely, and claims scaled to the evidence presented.

The Institute Behind the Journal

Understanding De Musica Disserenda requires understanding its institute. The Institute of Musicology of ZRC SAZU is Slovenia's national musicological research institute. Its documented activities include, since 1993, participation in RISM, the international inventory of musical sources, cataloguing music manuscripts from 1600 to 1850; cooperation since 1984 with RILM, the international bibliography of music literature, with the Slovenian national committee based at the Institute since 1991; critical editions of Slovenian musical heritage, from the Hren choirbooks to medieval chant from the Žiče Charterhouse; international conferences, exhibitions and concerts. A journal founded by such an institute in 2005 inherits its standards: source criticism, bibliographic discipline and an editorial memory of what has already been published on a topic. It also inherits its networks — the scholars who catalogue, edit and bibliograph the region's music are the journal's natural authors, reviewers and readers.

That inheritance explains features an author might otherwise find surprising. The five-language policy mirrors the linguistic reality of Central European musicology, where relevant scholarship appears in Slovenian, German, Italian and English, and where French remains a language of the discipline. The licence, CC BY-NC-ND, is more restrictive than the fully liberal licences of some open access journals — it permits sharing with attribution for non-commercial purposes but does not permit derivatives — and authors should understand that choice before submitting, not after acceptance. And the journal's patience with long, source-heavy articles reflects an institute culture in which a catalogue, an inventory or a documentary study is recognised as scholarship in its own right.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

DOAJ records double anonymous peer review for De Musica Disserenda, with the journal's submission guidance and editorial team pages referenced from its DOAJ record. The journal's site carries its instructions for contributors (the Slovenian-language prispevki guidance linked from DOAJ), covering submission and licensing terms. Authors preparing a manuscript should work from those current instructions for the practical details — file format, abstract and keyword requirements, citation style and the handling of musical examples and images, which in musicology are never a minor matter: examples must be legible, permissions for images documented, and source sigla used consistently.

No acceptance rate or review duration is published by the journal, and none could be verified for this profile; musicological review, which depends on a small pool of specialists able to check source claims, rarely runs to commercial timetables in any case. What can be said from the journal's record is that it has published continuously since 2005 — the article record visible in citation databases runs through volumes numbered into the twenties, with issues such as volume 15 (2019) published as combined numbers — and that continuity, under an academy institute, is itself a form of editorial information: this is a stable venue whose back volumes will remain hosted and citable. DOAJ records its open access start year as 2012, seven years after the journal's founding, which reflects the point from which its digital open access record runs in the directory; the print ISSN and the electronic ISSN side by side tell the same story of a journal founded in print and carried into open digital form.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges

The journal is open access and charges authors nothing: DOAJ records no article processing charge, with the journal's own contributor pages as the source. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and DOAJ records that authors retain copyright. Readers may therefore share articles freely with attribution for non-commercial purposes, in unchanged form. Authors should note the two practical limits of this licence compared with CC BY: commercial reuse requires permission, and translations or adapted versions are not licensed in advance. For most scholarly purposes — reading, citing, teaching, repository deposit of the published version in its original form — the licence is no obstacle, and the absence of any author fee, sustained by academy funding, keeps the journal open to scholars regardless of their institutions' publishing budgets. DOAJ records no separate deposit policy statement for the journal, so repository plans should be framed around the licence itself.

Indexing and Metrics, With Sources Kept Apart

This journal's DOAJ listing was verified directly through the DOAJ search API by ISSN 1854-3405 for this profile. The earlier stored Journals World record reported an h-index of 4 and Scopus coverage from 2013 to 2025, while SCImago-derived aggregator pages have described the journal as fourth-quartile in Music with an SJR around 0.101 and a lower h-index computed on their own window — a standard illustration of why a single unattributed metric misleads. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to source S4210216220, De musica disserenda, records 345 works, 219 citations, an h-index of 5, an i10-index of 3 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.081. Musicology is a small, book-centred, multilingual field in which citation counts are structurally low and slow; a two-decade journal from a national academy should be evaluated by the standing of its institute, the rigour of its review, the durability of its archive and the judgement of the specialists who publish in it — the standard tests of its own discipline — with database metrics reported, as here, as attributed snapshots rather than verdicts.

Who Should Publish Here, and How to Succeed

The journal suits musicologists with source-based or analytically grounded work, especially — though not only — work touching Slovenia, Central Europe, the Mediterranean world or the wider European tradition; scholars of music iconography, organology, early music, nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical cultures, and music theory in historical perspective; and researchers whose work needs a venue comfortable with musical examples, images and multilingual bibliography. It is a realistic and respectable venue for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in those fields, and its no-fee academy model removes the budget barrier that excludes many humanities scholars from open access publishing.

Success turns on scholarly craft. Identify sources precisely, with archives, shelfmarks and sigla where relevant. Engage the existing literature in the languages in which it actually exists — a Slovenian topic argued only from English-language sources will not persuade this readership. Keep analytical claims answerable to the musical and documentary evidence shown on the page. Follow the journal's contributor instructions for examples, images and references, and write the abstract with the care its five-language readership deserves. Authors should also choose the language of submission thoughtfully: publishing in English maximises international reach, while the journal's willingness to publish in German, Italian, French and Slovenian preserves arguments whose terminology and sources sit naturally in those languages — a freedom few journals still offer, and one of this title's genuine distinctions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of De Musica Disserenda?
Print ISSN 1854-3405 and electronic ISSN 2536-2615, confirmed in DOAJ.

Who publishes De Musica Disserenda?
Založba ZRC, the publishing house of ZRC SAZU, for the Institute of Musicology of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts' Research Centre. The numeric code in the older stored record was a garbled data field.

When was the journal founded?
In 2005, by the Institute of Musicology, according to the Institute's own institutional history.

Does the journal charge authors?
No — DOAJ records no article processing charge.

What licence applies?
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, per DOAJ: sharing with attribution for non-commercial purposes, without derivatives. Authors retain copyright, per DOAJ.

Is the journal peer reviewed?
Yes — double anonymous peer review, per DOAJ.

In which languages can I publish?
DOAJ lists Slovenian, English, German, French and Italian.

What are its metrics?
OpenAlex records 345 works, 219 citations and an h-index of 5 for the ISSN-resolved source; Scopus-derived records have reported an h-index of 4 and coverage from 2013. Figures are database-specific and are attributed as such.

Reading De Musica Disserenda as a Newcomer

The most instructive way to meet this journal is through its documentary habits. Take any recent article on a historical subject and follow its footnotes: the sources are identified by archive and shelfmark, the editions are named, the prior literature is engaged in the languages in which it was written, and the musical examples are integral to the argument rather than illustrative decoration. That is the standard the journal's double-blind reviewers — themselves specialists able to check such claims — will apply to a new submission. Reading across a volume also shows the journal's balance between its Slovenian home ground and its European horizon: studies of Slovenian musical sources and institutions appear beside work on Italian, German and wider European repertoires, and the five-language table of contents makes the volume itself a small map of how musicology in Central Europe actually communicates.

Newcomers should pay particular attention to the journal's treatment of images and examples, because music iconography and organology are living parts of its scope. Articles reproduce artworks, instruments and notation where the argument needs them, with the permissions and identifications that such reproduction requires. An author planning an image-heavy submission should therefore budget time for permissions and for high-quality reproductions from the start, rather than treating illustration as a production-stage afterthought. The same foresight applies to source photographs and transcriptions: in a journal published by the institute that catalogues the nation's musical manuscripts, the quality of documentary reproduction is part of the scholarship, and reviewers notice it.

A Practical Submission Checklist

Before submitting, an author can usefully confirm six points against the journal's current contributor instructions. First, that the manuscript's evidence is fully identified — archives, shelfmarks, editions and sigla stated precisely. Second, that the bibliography engages the relevant literature in its original languages, including Slovenian and German scholarship where the topic requires it. Third, that musical examples are legible, necessary and correctly captioned, and that image permissions are documented. Fourth, that the language of submission is chosen deliberately from the journal's five, with title, abstract and keywords prepared as the instructions require. Fifth, that the author is content with the CC BY-NC-ND licence, including its bar on derivatives, which affects later translation and adaptation plans. Sixth, that no fee expectations intrude in either direction: the journal charges nothing, and its academy model means authors should expect scholarly editing rather than commercial production services. A manuscript that arrives with those six points settled presents its reviewers with nothing to judge except the argument — which is exactly where a specialist author wants the judgement to fall.

The Journal and Slovenian Musical Heritage

A recurring service the journal performs — visible across its volumes and continuous with its institute's editions programme — is to put Slovenian musical heritage into international scholarly circulation. Sources held in Slovenian archives, compositions by Slovenian composers, and the musical life of Slovenian institutions enter the literature through these pages with the documentation that lets foreign scholars use them: identified manuscripts, edited evidence, and argument framed in one of the journal's widely read languages. For Slovenian scholars, that makes the journal a bridge between national material and international debate. For international scholars, it makes the journal a necessary port of call on any topic touching the region's music — and a reminder that small-language scholarly cultures sustain journals whose documentary value far exceeds what their citation counts, computed mostly from English-language sources, will ever show.

Finally, prospective authors should remember that a journal of this kind is read slowly and kept. Academy institute journals are bound into library runs, deposited in national collections and consulted decades later when a source, a repertoire or a name resurfaces in new research. Writing for that horizon — precise, documented, and free of fashion — is the surest way to be welcomed by the editors and reviewers who guard it.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal's DOAJ record retrieved through the DOAJ search API by ISSN (publisher, country, languages, licence, copyright, absence of charges, review model, keywords and subjects, open access start year), the Institute of Musicology's institutional pages (the journal's founding in 2005 and the Institute's RISM and RILM work), the journal's article record as visible in published DOIs under the 10.3986 prefix, and OpenAlex source S4210216220 resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint. SCImago-type values mentioned are attributed to those aggregators. No acceptance rate or review duration is stated, because the journal does not publish one and none could be verified.