Dear readers, colleagues and collaborators of TRANS,

We want to inform you that on May 16, 2009, the Argentine publishing house SB committed with Dr. Pablo Vila and TRANS -Revista Transcultural de Música  to withdraw from the market and destroy the remainders of the first edition of the book:

Antropología de la música. De los géneros tribales a la globalización. Volumen II. Teorías de la complejidad. Buenos Aires: SB. 2006, by Carlos Reynoso.

The publisher is undertaking this measure because   the bulk of a section of that book entitled  “Música y teoría cultural – Sheperd y Wicke” (pp. 319-329) coincides, word by word, ^[P1] with the article:

Vila, Pablo. 1999. "Review of  John Shepherd y Peter Wicke. Music and Cultural Theory Cambridge: Polity Press”,  TRANS Revista Transcultural de Música 4 (article 6).

Although Pablo Vila's article is included in the general bibliography of Carlos Reynoso's book, it is not quoted in the aforementioned pages. We reproduce here Pablo Vila´s article, highlighting the  fragments and pages that coincide with the book of SB Publishing House, so that the readers can  quote the work  appropriately.

The editorial board of TRANS Revista Transcultural de Música and the boards of SIBE-Spanish Society for Ethnomusicology and IASPM-Spain  would like to express their support and solidarity to Prof. Pablo Vila, author, guest editor and member of the advisory board of TRANS. Since the very beginning of the journal in 1995, Prof. Vila has supported this project, assuming the risks of publishing in an open-access digital journal when this medium was almost unknown  in our academic milieu.  Doing that he has offered TRANS some of the most important and quoted works in our  field of study^[P2] . Prof. Vila wants to communicate with the readers and collaborators of TRANS through this letter.

We would also like to stress the promptness and efficiency with which  SD Publishing House has dealt with this issue and its willingness to reach a satisfactory agreement for both parts. Its general director, Andrés C. Telesca, also wants to communicate with the readers and collaborators of TRANS through the following letter.

TRANS would like to take this opportunity to remark that, although the new information technology makes possible an unprecedented accessibility to scientific knowledge and the exchange among academic communities, the use of this technology requires a constant renewal of our methods and must follow the ethics of research practice that we teach to our students. Defending these principles is to defend the proliferation of free academic spaces like TRANS.

Unfortunately, there have been several cases in which parts of articles or whole articles originally published in TRANS have been reproduced in print or digital publications without the proper quotations. It is interesting to note that, while the majority of these incidents have happened inside our own academic community, blogs and non-academic web pages that make use of TRANS’ contents have shown a faster assimilation of the new rules and codes of good practices of the new digital era. There have been cases in which an author has simultaneously submitted the same article to TRANS and other journals.

Finally, we would like to remind you that TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música doesn't own the copyright of the articles it publishes. The authors are the ones who retain those rights and   TRANS just distributes their work under a Creative Commons licence (see the conditions of the licence in the journal's web page).  TRANS is an open-access on-line  journal hosted by the SIBE-Spanish Society for Ethnomusicology and IASMP-Spain. TRANS is an externally and anonymously refereed journal that guarantees academic excellence in all the materials it publishes. We offer the authors the possibility to publish in a journal with the highest impact factor in our academic milieu.

It is also important to point out that TRANS is the best rated music research  journal in Spain and that it is now being promoted in various European reference indexes of research journals.

Yours faithfully,

TRANS Editorial Board

SIBE-Spanish Society for Ethnomusicology Board

IASMP-Spain  Boardñ

• [P1] Eso es lo que literalmente dice la carta en castellano.
• [P2] Esto es lo que literalmente dice en el original en castellano.