Docomomo Journal

About Docomomo Journal

Docomomo Journal: Journal Profile and Complete Guide

Docomomo Journal is the open-access, peer-reviewed journal of Docomomo International, the worldwide organisation devoted to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement. It carries print ISSN 1380-3204 and online ISSN 2773-1634. What began as a newsletter in 1989 became a full journal in 1993, and it now appears twice a year, with an optional third issue, publishing theoretical, historical, technical and critical research on modern architecture, landscapes and urban environments from every continent. Its official publishing data places its editorial home in Delft, the Netherlands, since 2022, after periods in Lisbon (2014–2021) and Barcelona (2010–2013). The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), is indexed in Scopus, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, and charges an article processing charge of €500 on acceptance, as stated both on its own website and in its DOAJ record. This profile sets out the journal's history, scope, editorial and review arrangements, costs, indexing and metrics — each figure attributed to its source — and gives prospective authors a realistic picture of fit and process.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

Docomomo — the name compresses "documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the modern movement" — was founded as an international committee in 1988, and its journal grew out of the organisation's newsletter, launched in 1989, becoming a journal in its own right in 1993. The journal's own publishing data records a print run of 1,200–1,500 copies for the print edition, a reminder that this title has a physical life alongside its open-access digital edition. Its seat has followed the organisation's secretariat: Barcelona in the early 2010s, Lisbon from 2014 to 2021, and Delft from 2022 onward, with production support over the years from partners that the journal itself names, including TU Delft and TH OWL from 2022, the Municipality of Lisbon and Técnico – University of Lisbon in the Lisbon period, and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in the Barcelona period, alongside occasional support from institutions such as the Getty Conservation Institute and the Fondation Le Corbusier for specific issues.

The journal's numbering tells its longevity story: issues in the high fifties appeared in the late 2010s, and themed calls continue into the mid-2020s — a 2026 call, for example, invites work on nostalgia and futurism in modern architecture, edited by scholars at Delft University of Technology and Czech Technical University, with the resulting special issue scheduled for mid-2027 after double-blind review. That pattern — a standing journal that also works through guest-edited thematic issues built from open calls — is central to how Docomomo Journal operates, and prospective authors should watch its calls as attentively as its general submission route.

The Organisation Behind the Journal

Docomomo International is a non-profit organisation whose members work through national and regional working parties and specialist committees, documenting modern buildings and sites, maintaining registers of significant works, and intervening when important modern heritage is threatened. The journal is the publishing voice of that network, and it shows: much of what it prints originates in the documentation work of the community itself — surveys, case records, conservation reports and historical studies produced by people who are also engaged in listing campaigns and conservation practice. The journal states that Docomomo International maintains its activity through membership fees and additional funding from partners, and that the journal's main funding comes from the organisation. For an author, this structure means the readership is not an abstraction: it is a defined, international professional community of architects, planners, engineers, historians and conservation officials, spanning more than 90 countries in the journal's contributor base alone. Publishing here places research directly in front of the people who decide what modern heritage is recorded, protected and reused.

Scope and Thematic Profile

The journal's stated aim is to provide a regular summary of recent and original research on the documentation and conservation of Modern Movement buildings, sites and neighbourhoods, and to act as an exchange platform for architects, town planners, landscape architects, engineers, historians and sociologists. Its coverage is deliberately broad in period and geography: contributions have come from more than 90 countries across five continents, and themes range from adaptive reuse and new findings on built work to conservation technology and ideas for a sustainable built environment. Individual issues show the grain of the scope: issue 51 was devoted to modern housing under the banner "Patrimonio Vivo"; issue 52 took up reuse, renovation and restoration, opening with a Japanese elementary school of 1968 as its cover case; a later essay in issue 58 asked whether works of the Modern Movement should be conserved or allowed to change — the field's foundational tension, debated in the journal's own pages. A manuscript fits when it speaks to that community: documented case studies of modern buildings and landscapes, histories of modernism's people and institutions, technical studies of conservation and reuse, and critical or theoretical essays on the movement's legacy. Work on contemporary architecture with no modern-movement connection, purely local building reports without wider significance, and design portfolios without research content sit outside the scope.

Anatomy of an Issue

A typical issue is thematic, built either by invitation as a special issue or from an open call, and combines an editorial framing with research essays and documented case studies, richly illustrated with photographs, drawings and archival material. The citation record shows the format's durability: articles are individually citable with DOIs under the journal's own prefix (10.52200), and each article page offers a how-to-cite tool so readers can export an accurate reference. Because the journal is biannual with long guest-edited production cycles — the nostalgia-and-futurism call issued in 2026 leads to a mid-2027 issue — its tempo is measured; authors gain a carefully produced, well-illustrated issue and an engaged specialist audience, in exchange for accepting timelines that are longer than those of continuous-publication titles.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

The journal's editorial policies are published on its website and are unusually explicit. Contents are published by invitation for special issues and through free submissions answering thematic or open calls. Manuscripts are first assessed by the editors for suitability, formal compliance and thematic fit; those that pass are sent for double-blind peer review by independent, anonymous experts and members of the editorial and scientific boards. Reviewers are matched to manuscripts by expertise, must not have recent joint publications with the authors, must not come from the authors' institution, and must declare no conflict of interest. They judge significance, contribution to knowledge, originality, validity of discourse, critical judgement and bibliography. Where reports conflict, the editor may appoint additional reviewers; authors receive the reviewers' reasoned comments, and final decisions rest with the editors, with the editorial board involved if editors and reviewers disagree. The journal also publishes the processing-speed aims it sets itself: an average of ten working days to a first decision, twenty working days to the decision on whether a manuscript goes out for review, ten working days for authors to return revisions, fifteen working days from revised manuscript to acceptance, and twenty working days from acceptance to online publication of the version of record. These are stated aims, monitored by the journal itself, and authors can reasonably hold the journal to them in correspondence. Its publication-ethics framework follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which the editors, authors and publisher state they adopt.

Open Access, Licensing and Costs

Docomomo Journal is fully open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence: readers may use the work freely with attribution, which satisfies the licence conditions of most research funders. Against that openness stands a real author cost: the journal charges an article processing charge of €500, applied once an article has been accepted for publication. Discounts may apply — the journal names articles in special issues, journal sponsors and members of Docomomo International as examples, and invites authors who think they qualify to say so. Its DOAJ record corroborates the charge (maximum €500) and adds preservation information (Portico and the PKP Preservation Network are named there), which strengthens the title's archival credentials. Authors must therefore budget for the charge or establish a discount before accepting, while readers and librarians can treat the content as permanently free at the point of use.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's own indexing list, published on its about page, names the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, the British Architectural Library Catalogue (RIBA), the DOAJ, EBSCO's Art & Architecture Complete and Art & Architecture Source, the Electronic Journals Library, the European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, Google Scholar, Latindex, the Polish Scholarly Bibliography and Scopus. Its DOAJ record was added on 28 April 2022. For a journal in architectural history and heritage, the combination of Scopus, the Avery Index and the RIBA catalogue is precisely the discovery infrastructure its readership uses, and the DOAJ listing verifies its open-access status for librarians and funders.

Metrics: What the Sources Report

Figures here are reported with their sources because the numbers differ by database. OpenAlex, consulted directly by ISSN (source S4210168564), records 583 works and 332 citations for the journal, with an h-index of 6 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.4. Aggregator summaries of Scopus/SCImago data report a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.136, an impact score of 0.21, an h-index of 3, and category quartiles of Q3 in Architecture and Q4 in Urban Studies, with Scopus coverage from 2019 onward in those summaries. An earlier directory version of this profile quoted an h-index of 4 without naming a source; the sourced range — 3 in the Scopus-derived view, 6 in OpenAlex — is the accurate way to present it. The interpretation matters more than the decimals: this is a young entrant in citation databases (its Scopus coverage window is recent even though the journal is three decades old), serving a practice-facing heritage field whose influence runs through conservation decisions, listings and professional guidance as much as through citations. Authors should present its standing honestly — a society journal with verified Scopus and DOAJ presence and a specialist readership — rather than inflating quartile claims.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Not

The ideal author is a researcher, practitioner or doctoral candidate working on the Modern Movement: documenting a building, estate, landscape or urban plan; evaluating a conservation or adaptive-reuse intervention; recovering the history of a modernist practice, institution or network; or arguing a theoretical position about modern heritage. Guest-edited calls — such as the current nostalgia-and-futurism call, which asks for a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography through the journal platform — reward authors who respond to a theme early. The journal is a poor fit for work on pre-modern or purely contemporary architecture without a modern-movement frame, for technical conservation science aimed at laboratory journals, and for authors who cannot meet the €500 charge and do not qualify for a discount; that exclusion should be checked at the outset, not after review. Authors also need illustration-rich manuscripts: this is a visually literate field, and the journal's issues are built around photographs, drawings and archival images whose rights the author must clear.

Practical Guidance for Authors

Start from the journal's platform: read the current calls and deadlines, the submission guidelines, and the about page's review description, then prepare the manuscript to the stated format before uploading. Expect the double-blind process described above, keep the journal's published processing aims in mind when planning a submission around a thesis defence, grant report or conference, and respond to reviewers within the revision window the journal sets (its stated average expectation is ten working days for author revisions, which is brisk and should be planned for). Budget the €500 acceptance charge or raise a discount claim when submitting. Secure image permissions early. Cite the journal's own literature where your case extends it — issue themes such as modern housing and reuse show conversations already in progress that a strong submission can join. Articles carry DOIs (the journal's DOI pattern, visible in its article pages, follows the form 10.52200/…), and each article page provides a how-to-cite tool, which supports accurate citation in reference managers.

For Librarians and Readers

Cataloguers should record the title under its two ISSNs — 1380-3204 for print, 2773-1634 for online — with Docomomo International as publisher and the Netherlands as the country of the current editorial base, noting the earlier Lisbon and Barcelona periods for the back run. Because the journal is open access with DOAJ-verified status and named preservation services, libraries can link it confidently in discovery layers without subscription management, and the print edition's modest run means the digital edition is the preservation copy of first resort for most institutions. Readers coming to the journal from outside the heritage professions should start with a themed issue close to their region or building type: the journal's case-study format makes individual articles self-contained, and its editorials frame each theme's stakes for non-specialists. Researchers tracing a specific modern building will often find that a Docomomo Journal article is the earliest published documentation of it, which gives the journal a citation role in heritage statements, listing nominations and conservation plans that purely academic titles rarely achieve — a form of impact that citation databases do not capture but that practitioners rely on daily.

A Note on Using This Journal in Research

For researchers, the practical way into Docomomo Journal is through its themes: search the archive by movement, building type, country or conservation problem, and expect to find the field's standard references already gathered there. Doctoral researchers in particular use its issues as orientation maps — an issue's editorial and opening essays usually state a theme's current scholarly position, after which the case studies supply the evidence base.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1380-3204 and online ISSN 2773-1634, as stated in the journal's own publishing data.

Who publishes Docomomo Journal? Docomomo International, the international committee for documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement.

Is it open access? Yes, under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Does it charge authors? Yes: an article processing charge of €500 on acceptance, with possible discounts (special issues, sponsors, Docomomo International members).

How often does it appear? Twice a year, with an optional third issue.

When was it founded? It began as a newsletter in 1989 and became a journal in 1993; Docomomo International itself dates to 1988.

How are manuscripts reviewed? After editorial screening, by double-blind peer review with independent experts; the journal publishes target times for each stage on its website.

Is it in the DOAJ and Scopus? Yes to both; the DOAJ record was added on 28 April 2022, and Scopus is named in the journal's own indexing list.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex reports 583 works, 332 citations and an h-index of 6; Scopus-derived summaries report an SJR of 0.136, Q3 in Architecture and Q4 in Urban Studies. Cite figures with their source.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile rests primarily on the journal's own website — its about page (aims and scope, open-access policy, indexing list, editorial policies, review timetable, ethics, charges, funding and publishing data) and its published calls — together with its DOAJ record (publisher country, charge, licence and preservation services, record date), OpenAlex data retrieved directly by ISSN, and aggregator summaries of Scopus/SCImago data for quartile and SJR figures, attributed in the text. No figure is presented without its source, and where sources differ (notably the h-index), the difference is reported rather than smoothed over.