Voices of the Future

By Brynjulf Stige |Author bio & contact info|

"Our future is grey, but that shouldn’t make us blue!" I recently heard an old lady express these words. She was of the optimistic type who felt that life was rich with possibilities, even though she knew that not every possibility would be a reality for her.

The Voices journal is not of very high age yet, so it’s too early to speak of a grey future. There are many good reasons, however, to ask ourselves about which possibilities we would like to convert to reality.

One possibility converted to reality recently was the establishment of a systematic peer review system for Voices. This change seems to have been popular among our authors and we now have many more submitted texts from various continents than what we had before. This can only improve the quality of the journal. In July – at the 12th World Congress of Music Therapy in Buenos Aires – the group of editors will sit down together and discuss this new review system and other actions we can take with Voices in the future.

There is one thing that we do not want to change, however, and that is the Open Access profile of our journal. Our vision is to make a high quality journal accessible for readers all over the world and in this way to enable dialogue and discussions across boundaries. The only problem with this vision, as far as I can see at least, is money. In a small field like music therapy, a journal with no incomes from subscriptions may become financially very vulnerable.

This happened to Voices, even though both our previous host Sogn og Fjordane University College and our contemporary hosts University of Bergen and Unifob Health have been generous indeed. In fact, we have for some time known that we did not have money for the continuation of Voices after July 2009.

But this has changed. Last week, the GC Rieber Foundation in Bergen decided to support Voices financially. We are extremely grateful and happy for this generous gift and now know that we are financially safe until 2012. Our future is not grey, and blue is obviously only one of the many rich colours that we will experience!