5th anniversary ofthe Helsinki Initiative
Multilingualism in
ScholarlyCommunication
Multilingualism in thereform of researchassessment
Laura Rovelli FOLECCLACSO

Linguistic diversity in Latin America and theCaribbean+ 400 million people in the Americas speak
Spanish as their First Language.
247 million people speak English as theirmother tongue, 204 million people speak
Brazilian Portuguese, about 8 million
people speak French or French Creole.
+ Only four of the dominant language
families, Quechua (9 million speakers)
and Aymara (2.2 millionspeakers), Guarani (5 million speakers)
and Nahuatl (Aztec; 1.5 million), the mostwidely spoken languages of indigenous
peoples of the Americas, are considered
to be not endangered.
Source:https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/american_languages.htm#
google_vignette• Dominant forms of evaluation stimulate thepublication of articles in English, in detrimentof other formats and communication
languages, thereby excluding a large part ofknowledge production in many countries andregions of the world.
• Monolingualism disincentive fluid dialogue
among academics who share the same language,or who speak and understand multiple languages.
• In 2020 (Web of Science), 95% of the total
articles in scientific journals were in English,
and 1% in Spanish or Portuguese.
• Growing trend in Portugal and Brazil to publishin English.
• Even in the social sciences and humanities, thepublication of articles in English is increasingly
being chosen as a format.

Language barriers have a widespread impact+ English hyper centralism not only
impoverishes the record of science but
also substantially affects thepublishing possibilities of researchers
from non-English speaking countries,
who are constantly subjected toreviews requested by journals claimingthat they need to have their texts
proofread by “native speakers”.

+Ramírez-Castañeda V (2020) Disadvantages in preparing andpublishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English
language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biologicalsciences. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0238372.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238372

CLACSO-FOLEC Declaration of Principles• Writing in English does not confer a merit per
se superior to publications in other languages.
Multilingualism favors the development ofsocially relevant research and contributes tosustaining cultural diversity.

Multilingual Open Science for all+ Open access to scientific knowledge andinteraction between science and society ispossible only if scientific knowledge is
produced, communicated and used in
multiple languages and formats.
+ Inequalities among the scientificcommunities of developed and developing
countries caused by Article Processing
Charges, (APC) and Book Processing
Charges (BPC), as they transfer costs toauthors and/or their institution (UNESCO,2021).

Language diversity inregional publications+ In LAC, Spanish and Portuguese subsist as
languages of publication, regional infrastructurewith its own indexing system (Latindex, SciELO,Redalyc), including thousands of predominantly
university-based journals managed by thecommunity itself with diamond open access.
+ Open access institutional repositories that reflect
the production of each university give more
visibility to the bibliodiversity and multilingualismof scientific-scholarly production in Latin American
universities. In the region, there is a longstanding
tradition of publishing books through university orspecialized publishing houses.

Beigel, F. et. al. (2024). OLIVA: The Scientific output in journals
edited in Latin America. Disciplinary Diversity, Institutional
Collaboration, and Multilingualism in SciELO and Redalyc(1995-2018), Revista Dados. Rio de Janeiro Vol.67 N.1.
https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.2653 (Original work published2021)

Motives for change in evaluation systems+ Heteronomous assessment indicators, used inranking systems and accreditation of institutions,based on international commercial services onlyreflect a small percentage of quality publications in
our region.
+ Improving the coverage of open scientificinformation in global open infrastructures is amaster key to make visible and expand thecirculation of scientific and local knowledge
produced in different languages, formats and indiverse geographic regions, linked to different
critical local and development problems.

Including Multilingualism in Research
Assessment Reform• Explicit or implicit language priorities inassessment may:
• Compromise equal opportunities forindividual researchers and institutions• Endanger locally relevant research andknowledge transfer beyond academia• Ensuring that high quality research is valued
regardless of the publishing language
entails:• Taking into account publications outside
the so called “mainstream” databases.
• Engaging sufficiently diverse pool ofexperts and linguistic skills in theassessment panels.
.

Incentives for multilingualism in
responsible research assessment+ Academic career assessment: encourage
multilingualism and publishing in local
languages. Examples: percentage ofpublications in Spanish / Portuguese / French/ German / others with respect to theproduction; at least 1 publication in
indigenous languages.

Supportive initiatives promoting
multilingualism+ An important initiative for mapping
scholarly publishing is “ES-CIENCIA”, anInterdisciplinary Thematic Platform developed by
the CSIC, which constitutes an important resource
to value and understand scientific communicationin Spanish.
Repositories have made systematic progress inharvesting and curating institutional output, but stillrequire major investments to achieve theirintegration at a national or inter-institutional level.

+ For open access academic books, there is aninternational indexing system, the Directory ofOpen Access Books (DOAB), which includes morethan 600 publishers, but still has a limited numberof diverse presses from all regions of the world.

+ The Norwegian model Cristin is a noteworthy
experience, as it includes books for the faculty’s
performance evaluation, using a qualitativeclassification that ranks the contributions of these
disciplines and their publications in the local
language, including a categorization process.

All languages have value in scientificcommunication.
Let’s make it worthy in researchassessment