Culture & Musées (formerly known as Publics & Museums from 1992 to 2003) is an international double-blind, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing new research on cultural institutions, audiences and mediations. The Journal aims at a wide readership of researchers, students as well as museum and cultural heritage professionals.
The Journal was established in the context of close collaboration between researchers in sociology, psychology, art history, semiology, linguistics and philosophy, and a growing interest from the museum community in audience evaluation studies. For founders Jean Davallon and Hana Gottesdiener, the challenge of creating a scientific journal of museology was then to offer researchers and practitioners support for research dissemination in a French-language journal; in this perspective, the Journal’s creation was regarded as a decisive landmark in structuring museology as a scientific discipline. The first issue of Publics & Musées was thus published in 1992 and another eighteen issues followed. By 2002, a decision was made to widen the Journal’s perspective on institutions, audiences and evaluation tools for museums and cultural heritage, to encompass other areas of culture; Publics & Musées then became Culture & Musées.
Given the recent digital developments in scientific publishing and the new opportunities for knowledge dissemination, the Journal’s editorial board decided to switch to a digital format as of January 2018. The Journal then started a transition to a new editorial model based on open access content, via the OpenEditions platform, an electronic data-resources portal dedicated to humanities and social sciences. In this “freemium” format, papers are freely available to all readers in HTML format, while the PDF and ePub formats are available to subscribers only.
Culture & Musées is published with the support of France’s Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction générale des patrimoines – département de la politique des publics, and Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
Culture & Musées has an international scope: the Journal has been indexed by the INIST and Arts and Humanities Citation Index & Current Contents databases, as well as the Arts and Humanities (Thomson Reuters) since 2010. Culture & Musées is also indexed by the HCERES and the French 71st CNU section (Information and Communication Sciences).
(Source: https://journals.openedition.org/culturemusees/1430#tocto1n1)