This volume 46 of the ICOFOM Study Series is special. For four years now, we have continued on the path to which ICOFOM is committed: a deeper and more rigorous peer review procedure, but also a more advanced editing and printing process for our journal. This year 2018, after a two-year process, our journal has also been accepted to appear in the digital portal of revues.org/OpenEdition Journals hosted by the OpenEdition, a scientific publishing platform supported by the CNRS and several French universities. This portal, which hosts several hundred academic journals, will help us to increase the visibility of our activities within the professional community. We also took this opportunity to radically transform the graphic design and format of our journal, in its paper version, in collaboration with the graphic designer and typeface designer Bruno Bernard who also drew for us the covers of the collection of ICOFOM monographs that we launched in 2017 and which is available on our website.

Volume 46 of the ICOFOM Study Series contains a selection of the papers presented at the ICOM’s 40th Symposium of the International Museum of Museology held in Cuba in October 2017. This is the first time that ICOFOM and, apparently, an international committee of ICOM met in Cuba; a rich and intense experience, remarkably well orchestrated by our hosts, just a few weeks after the cyclones hit the city of Havana. Cuba proved to be a really good place in which to discuss politics in the museum and museology, and the discussions around these different concepts were particularly rich and fruitful with participation from all five continents.

This review cannot function without its many contributors, including the anonymous peer reviewers as well as all the members of ICOFOM who participated in the work of secretarial, proofreading, correction and editing. We thank them here very sincerely