For information on submitting your materials, please see this page.
Articles
Essays offered for publication should represent the author’s original research, not previously published and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions should be 8,000 words at maximum (including footnotes and bibliography) and be in the hands of the general editor or guest editor(s) by 1 January of the year in which publication is anticipated. All submissions are initially assessed by the editor. If felt to be suitable, they will then be passed on to referees, whose recommendations, along with the availability of space and an essay’s agreement with the overall plan for a given issue, determine whether a paper is accepted.
Submission format
All manuscripts must be in English and should be submitted in Microsoft Word formats (.doc or .docx). A printed copy of the submission might also be requested by the general editor, but should not initially be submitted.
Please use 12 pt Times New Roman font, with double-spaced, left-aligned paragraphs. Italicize all occurrences of non-English words. Subheadings should be bold and on separate lines from the main text. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively with arabic numerals throughout the paper, using the footnote feature of your word processor. In-text citations use the author-date system of referencing (e.g., Dibura 1981), with full bibliographic references listed at the end of the paper. The list of references should contain bibliographic details, including the full name of all authors and editors. Please consult the style used in the current Yearbook and the Chicago Manual of Style. A detailed submission guideline may be downloaded from the ICTM website at: http://www.ictmusic.org/publications/yearbook-for-traditional-music/submissions.
Illustrations (photographs, diagrams, music and dance notations, maps, etc.) should be provided as separate computer files — they should not be included in the file containing the article’s text. Computer files of photographs and maps should be supplied in both greyscale and colour (if applicable), saved in JPEG or TIFF format, minimally at 300 dpi when at 100% size. Diagrams, line drawings, and musical examples should be supplied as black-and-white bitmap files in TIFF format at 1000 dpi at 100% size.
The maximum dimensions of all illustrations are 19 cm height × 11.6 cm width, but they will very likely be reduced during layout. All illustrations and tables should be numbered consecutively in the order of their appearance in the paper and labelled “Figures” (e.g., Figure 1, Figure 2). Please provide captions for all figures; the submission should also contain in-text references to all figures. If illustrations cannot be provided as computer files, the hard copy supplied should be suitable for scanning and publication. In such cases, the hard copy must have figure numbers written in pencil on the reverse side. Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate permissions for the use of any illustrations that are not their own creations. For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
For more information about images, please visit https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/journals/journals-artwork-guide.
All manuscripts must be accompanied by an English abstract of less than a hundred words and a brief biography of the author of no more than seventy words. Authors are also encouraged to supply a one-page summary of their article in the language of the subject matter, to be printed with their paper. A glossary of non-English terms should accompany the submission whenever appropriate (please refer to the latest volume for examples).
Authors whose papers are accepted for publication are encouraged to make use of the Cambridge Core to upload materials meant to supplement printed articles in the journal. Authors are encouraged to make available for downloading any recordings of the music and dance discussed in their articles. The general editor welcomes discussion over such details.
Members/subscribers of the International Council for Traditional Music in good standing receive a free copy of the Yearbook for Traditional Music.
Copyright
The policy of Yearbook for Traditional Music is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant the International Council for Traditional Music a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Publishing ethics
Authors should check the Yearbook's Publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.