Expanding Access, Expanding Understanding: How One Howard Faculty Member Is Reframing Global Music Scholarship

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

Within the Department of Music, a long-running faculty initiative is quietly reshaping how scholars, students, and researchers access and understand music scholarship across the globe. What began as a simple list has grown into a robust, internationally recognized resource—one that reflects both the scale of global musical inquiry and the ongoing need for greater equity in academic publishing.

Dr. Matthew Franke, who joined Howard University in 2015, began compiling what would become the List of Open-Access Music Journals just one year later. At its core, the project centers on accessibility.

“These are journals that post all their research online for free at no charge to the reader.”

Initially, the effort was straightforward. But as the list expanded, so did its ambition. By 2019, with more than 140 entries, the project had outgrown its original format. In response, Dr. Franke built a searchable database, allowing users to filter journals by keywords, languages, subject matter, and geography—transforming a static list into a dynamic research tool.

That evolution continued in 2020, when Dr. Franke received a junior faculty fellowship from Howard University to further develop the project into a scholarly article. At the time, the database had grown to approximately 180 journals. His research was later published in College Music Symposium in 2021, offering both a resource and a critical framework for understanding the landscape of open-access music scholarship.

This is not simply a project of aggregation; it is an act of interrogation.

In both his published work and subsequent presentations—including a 2024 panel on “Open-Access Publishing in Musicology” at the American Musicological Society national conference in Chicago—Dr. Franke has used the database to surface deeper structural questions within the field.

Reflecting on that work, he noted, “I spoke about imbalances in scholarly publishing and the general dominance of Western scholarship in open-access spaces and how scholars could do more to create understanding between people of different cultures.”

That insight is explored more directly in his published research:

Open-access journals have amplified the perspectives of scholars and academic societies in industrialized states, especially the United States and the European Union. As these regions already wield tremendous political, economic, and cultural power, open-access technology has provided a tool by which Western perspectives can spread even more effectively across the globe... Although the existing model has provided a global audience for this local discourse, it runs the risk of creating an echo chamber in which Western disciplinary approaches, perspectives, and topics are the main ones that matter.

That perspective has shaped the continued growth of the database, which now includes nearly 400 journals from across the world and continues to expand as scholars contribute new entries. The scope is intentionally global, with journals representing countries such as the United States, South Korea, Kenya, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Ukraine, Mexico, and Turkey. The list continues to grow through community contributions, reflecting both the scale of global scholarship and the demand for more inclusive access.

The result is both a practical tool and a conceptual intervention, one that challenges assumptions about where knowledge is produced, who has access to it, and how disciplines evolve across cultural contexts.

At a university long defined by its commitment to truth, excellence, and global impact, the work resonates on multiple levels. It supports student learning, advances faculty research, and aligns with a broader institutional mission to expand access to knowledge while deepening cultural understanding.

Dr. Franke’s work in the classroom reflects that same commitment. He teaches across a wide range of courses, including music history for majors and minors, as well as classes in popular music, jazz, folk music, global heritage musics, and classical traditions. In 2022, he received the College’s Outstanding Teaching Award, a recognition of both his scholarship and his impact on students.

The database he curates extends that impact beyond the classroom, offering a resource that is as expansive as it is intentional. In connecting scholars to freely accessible research across continents, it opens pathways not only to information, but to perspective.

And in doing so, it reinforces a simple but powerful idea: access is not just about availability—it is about inclusion, representation, and the ongoing work of building a more complete understanding of the world’s artistic and intellectual traditions.