Call for papers: Romanian Journal for Museums No. 1/2026

Call for papers: The Romanian Journal for Museums no. 1/2026

Deadline: June 15th, 2026

Articles should be sent to: revistamuzeelor@culturadata.ro

Main Theme: The Responsible Museum: Between Principles and Pressures in Contemporary Society

Museums are facing a fundamental reassessment of their social and ethical role amid a convergence of challenges: the revision of the ICOM Code of Ethics (with a final vote scheduled for June 2026), the increasing societal polarization documented by the 2025 NEMO Barometer (with over 70% of museums reporting political pressure), and the realignment of institutional practices with the new definition of the museum adopted in 2022. At the same time, reference to the principles of the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention on the value of cultural heritage for society, recently integrated into the Romanian regulatory framework, provides museums with an operational framework for the necessary ethical, social, and institutional repositioning.

These developments redefine the museum’s responsibility not merely as a custodian of heritage, but as a complex social actor with multiple and often conflicting ethical obligations.

In this context, this year’s theme of the Museum Journal invites contributions that explore the museum’s responsibility as a relationship articulated on multiple levels:

• toward heritage (acquisition policies, provenance, curatorial decisions);
• toward the communities served (representation, co-construction of meaning);
• toward collective social memory;
• toward the demands of impartiality in the face of political instrumentalization. 

In this regard, we encourage interdisciplinary approaches and diverse perspectives (curators, museum directors, researchers in museum studies, specialists in heritage ethics, etc.), which address, but are not limited to:

1. Responsibility toward heritage: critical reflections on collection formation and development policies in light of revised ethical principles. 
2. Critical positions regarding the revision of the ICOM Code of Ethics
3. Inclusion as a cross-cutting principle: from discourse to practice, representing diversity in all phases of museum activity: collection building, research, curatorial interpretation, mediation, and accessibility.
4. Institutional independence: case studies and theoretical perspectives on negotiating museum autonomy in relation to political and financial influences and pressure from interest groups. Strategies for institutional resistance and resilience.

We invite you to reflect on how museums can responsibly navigate contemporary ethical challenges, whether through empirical research articles, comparative case studies, theoretical and conceptual analyses, or critical perspectives.

We also look forward to receiving your proposals for articles that fit into the journal’s recurring thematic sections, the review sections, the section dedicated to opinion pieces, or the newly introduced section dedicated to project reports.

Recurring themes

The research articles gathered in this section will address one of the themes:

1. Collection, record keeping, documentation and research
2. Preservation and restoration
3. Interpretation and communication of the museum heritage (curatorship, mobility of collections, museum aesthetics, etc.)
4. Museum marketing
5. Museums and new technologies (digitalisation, digitisation, equipment, tools, new techniques, etc.)
6. Organisational development and sustainability (management, funding, etc.)
7. Ethics, history and museum theory
8. Museums and the community / society
9. Museum statistics

Reviews

1. Publication reviews: texts of 2000-2500 words that discuss the latest books published in the museum field. The reviews aim to inform the community of museum professionals, experts and researchers about the quality, purpose, and arguments of a book and explain how it relates to the current literature. For details, see the Editing Guide, p.6.
2. Exhibition reviews: authors are invited to critically describe an exhibition or a set of related exhibitions, other than those organised by the author / the institution to which they are affiliated. The contributions should be at most 3000 words long, using a critical, objective and independent analysis, supported by relevant images. Moreover, they should offer perspectives that would advance the general practice, irrespective of the readers’ ability to access the exhibition. For details, please see the Editing Guide, p.7.

Opinion Articles

This section invites authors to draft or launch discussion topics through original personal contributions of about 2000-2500 words. These may be related to the main theme or one / more of the recurring themes and present the author’s critical viewpoint on various topics in the field of museums, – existing problems, fundamental concepts or prevailing notions on a particular topic. The texts may also advance and support a new hypothesis or discuss the implications of a newly implemented innovation. The contributions expected in this section are based on a constructive, well-documented critique, with logical and objective arguments that can be supported by scientific evidence.

Project Reports

The project reports section will contain texts of maximum 3000 words that summarize and present results relevant to the museum field, obtained within projects carried out with the support of external or national grant funding programs. These texts will aim at presenting concrete achievements reached through the projects: guidelines, good practice examples, innovative approaches, methodologies, databases or other types of tangible or intangible resources that have a (potentially) significant impact on the development of the museum field. Articles may make direct reference through links to additional documentary resources.
Texts for this section can only be submitted by authors who have directly participated in the project and will be evaluated by the editorial team.

Rules of drafting

Authors interested in submitting a proposal must follow the Editorial Guidelines and include the authors’ full contact information (phone number, email address, affiliation, and institutional address) with their submissions. If photographs or illustrations are used in the text, they must be submitted separately in the formats specified in the Guidelines.

Manuscripts may be written in Romanian, English, or French. The editorial board of the Journal of Museums encourages authors to explore the potential of their chosen topics in an original manner, provided that they adhere to editorial standards and principles of academic ethics. All article proposals that do not comply with the journal’s editorial guidelines will be returned to the authors for revision and will only then enter the review process.

Manuscript proposals that are plagiarized or generated by Artificial Intelligence, do not fit the journal’s thematic scope or editorial profile, present biased or extreme positions, are poorly documented, or do not meet minimum quality standards for writing will be rejected without undergoing the external review process.

Assessment

As usual, the articles will be subject to an objective and impartial double blind peer-review evaluation and selection process.

The Romanian Journal for Museums is indexed in international databases such as CEEOL and EBSCO.

https://doi.org/10.61789/rm