Balancing common language andmultilingualism as drivers forequity, diversity and inclusion
Moderator: Henriikka Mustajoki
Panellists: Cissi Askwall, Marin Dacos, Johan Rooryck,
Laura Rovelli

15th July 2022

• The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly
Communication was launched in 2019 to foster anenvironment that values multilingual scholarly
communication, science communication and open
access to scholarly publications in all languages.
• The long-term goal of the Helsinki Initiative is to ensure
the continued availability of high-quality research
published in all languages needed across the world foreffective communication of research knowledge within
and beyond academia.
• Signatories from over 70 countries agree thatmultilingualism in scholarly communication is aninternational, not just national or local concern.

CONCLUSIONS ON RESEARCH ASSESSMENT AND
IMPLEMENTATION OF OPEN SCIENCE
10th of June 2022
● ACKNOWLEDGES that in order to accelerate theimplementation and the impact of Open Science
policies and practices across Europe, action has tobe taken to… encourage where appropriate, theuse of multilingualism for the purpose of wider
communication of European research results.
● ACKNOWLEDGES the important role ofmultilingualism in the context of science
communication with society, in particular on thenational and regional levels; in this respect,
WELCOMES initiatives to promote
multilingualism, such as the Helsinki initiative on
multilingualism in scholarly communication"

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Support dissemination of research results for thefull benefit of the society.
•Make sure researchers are merited for disseminating research results
beyond academia and for interacting with heritage, culture, and society.

•Make sure equal access to researched knowledge is provided in a varietyof languages.

2. Protect national infrastructures for publishing
locally relevant research.
•Make sure not-for-profit journals and book publishers have bothsufficient resources and the support needed to maintain high standardsof quality control and research integrity.

•

Make sure national journals and book publishers are safeguarded intheir transition to open access.

3. Promote language diversity in research assessment,evaluation, and funding systems.
•Make sure that in the process of expert-based evaluation, high quality
research is valued regardless of the publishing language or publication
channel.

•Make sure that when metrics-based systems are utilized, journal andbook publications in all languages are adequately taken into account.

Cissi Askwall

How multilingualism supports broad interaction with society?
• Science in the Limelight more than ever
• Open Science a key tool
• Know and listen to your Target Groups• Foster Science Capital and Source Criticism• Counter Mis- and Disinformation→ Strenghen Democracy!

Marin Dacos

How can translations and new technology support multilingualism?
Measures1. Generalize the obligation to publish in open access
2. Support open access economic publishing model3. Encourage multilingualism
Extend the global influence of French research publications➔ Develop tools to support multilingualism using semi-automatic translation➔ Issue an international call for research into automatic translation➔ Encourage the use of findings from French research in the global
collaborative Wikipedia encyclopaedia.
Towards a shared platform for semi-automatic translation of research texts● A shared platform at the service of the ecosystem● Accessible to authors, publishers and platforms● Disciplinary learning bases● Room for post-editing by a publishing / translation professional● Validated results would improve the learning base
Phase 1 - 2021: a working group and a first report
Phase 2 - 2022: Prefiguration case studies (budget 500K€)
Phase 3 - 2023: The big project?

Johan Rooryck

What funders can do to promote multilingualism?
•In line with Principle 10 of Plan S, funders can stress that they value theintrinsic merit of the research output and not the prestige of (Englishlanguage) journals.

•-> National funders can stress that publication in the national language isvalued in the same way as publication in English.

•Books and bibliodiversity:
cOAlition S academic books statement, Recommendation 5:“cOAlition S funders should financially support Open Access of academic
books via their funding schemes and open access publishing businessmodels via dedicated arrangements.”•-> National funders can promote multilingual bibliodiversity of academic
books via funding schemes for Open Access books.

Johan Rooryck

What funders can do to promote multilingualism?
Funders can support national Diamond Open Access initiatives that are most often
multilingual:• HRČAK Portal (507 Croatian OA Journals)• OpenEdition (France, 567 journals)• Calidad revistas científicas españolas project (FECYT, seal of quality)• Journal.fi (110 Finnish scholarly journals, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies)• Openjournals.nl (Dutch platform for OA journals, founded by KNAW, NWO and theOPUS Foundation.)
The Diamond Open Access study has shown that most Diamond journals
are multilingual while serving an international readership.
cOAlition S is participating in the DIAMAS project to federate and align Diamond Open
Access journals in Europe. This project will pay attention to multilingual publishing offull texts and abstracts, discoverability of content, human translation services, andmachine translation tools.

Laura Rovelli

How multilingualism fits in responsible research assessment?
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CLACSO-FOLEC Declaration of Principles on Research Assessment supports○ Multilingualism and locally relevant research, Impact and interaction with society, beyond academia, the Helsinki Initiative
Growing trend of Portugal and Brazil to publish in English○ In 2020 (Web of Science), 95% of the total articles in scientific journals were in English, and 1% in Spanish or Portuguese.
○ In LAC, Spanish and Portuguese subsist as languages of publication,■ regional infrastructure with its own indexing system (Latindex, SciELO, Redalyc), including thousands of predominantly
university-based journals managed by the community itself with diamond or platinum open access.
Ranking systems and accreditation of institutions use heteronomous assessment indicators○ These indicators, based on international commercial services such as WoS and Scopus, only reflect a small percentage of
quality publications in our region.
New bibliodiverse assessment indicators must be created to support responsible assessment and the diversity of research outputs
in the region○ Successful case: the resolution (Res. 2249) for the Social and Human Sciences from the National Council for Scientific andTechnical Research (CONICET, Argentina).

Multilingualism is integral to Open Science• It is important to communicate research
results to international expert audiences
according to the best practices andtraditions of each discipline.
• However, if research is communicatedexclusively in English, academia risks not
fully meeting all its missions andresponsibilities toward society.
• Broad access to scientific knowledge andinteraction between science and society ispossible only if scientific knowledge isproduced, communicated and used inmultiple languages.

Academic publishing in France is increasingly monolingual

https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr/publications/general?id=general.langues-ouverture
Warning : only publications with a DOI.

Students, professional and personal use are important

Private companies also read open access HSS

Thanks to open access, OpenEdition (Humanities and social sciences platform). For the bank Crédit Mutuel, forexample, 99,003 accesses are identified over the period 2017-mid 2019, mainly covering 18,000 different articles.
This is similar to the consultation of the University of Lausanne. Source: OpenEdition Lab research programme,
Appropriation of open knowledge, funded by the IDEX of Aix-Marseille University. Publication to come.
More : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqHsyXgWap8&t=46s

Case study: the audience of four open access journals
26% French speaking and 65% Spanish speaking

French speaking journal

94% French speaking

Spanish-language journalTraffic by browser language for 4 journals
26% French speaking and 65% Spanish speaking

94% French speaking

Spanish-language journal

OpenEdition's top 25 journals and their languages.
In page views (2021 extrapolated)

Multilingualism is not only a question for
Humanities and Social Sciences

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/

How lingua franca and multilingualism promote open science to bridgeover existing barriers for knowledge transfer across disciplinary,geographical or societal borders in order to create resilient societies?
Academics publish in amonolingual world
This deprives us of animportant audience.

The 17 SDGs need bothinternational knowledge in English
and local knowledge in their own
language. Multilingualism
facilitator of cultural diversity andsocial relevant research.

Cissi Askwall
Marin Dacos
Johan Rooryck
Laura Rovelli

Research should be accessible
to everyone. To accomplish
that, lingua franca andmultilingualism arecomplementary.
Multilingualism promotes
equity: the knowledge of perfectacademic English should not be
a pre-condition for participatingin the scholarly debate.

COVID-19 Highlighted Global Value of Multilingualism• The COVID-19 pandemic saw a widespreadneed for multilingual communication
between researchers, decision-makers,professionals and citizens.
• At its broadest, the impact of research can beglobal, but impact is always realized locally insocieties where different languages arewritten and spoken.
• To cope with grand challenges and to meetsustainable development goals, we needboth globalized and localized researchcommunicated in various languages andformats.

How digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learningand virtual reality foster multilingualism in creating translations?
While we await more significant
results in machine translation andartificial intelligence applied totranslation, LAC is graduallyadvancing by adding metadata
reflected in some repositories.

Authors and journal editors canhelp by providing lingua francatranslations of the abstracts of
their articles: abstracts inlingua franca can serve as aportal to the article.

Marin Dacos
Laura Rovelli
Cissi Askwall
Johan Rooryck

The cost of translation istremendous. We don’t have achoice than to explore automaticand semi-automatic translation as
opportunities for multilingualism

New technologies help a lot,
but to be useful beyond
academia manual fine tuningis also necessaryDiamond Open Access Supports Multilingual Publishing• Diamond OA is practicallythe only option for nonprofit journals publishing inlanguages other thanEnglish• Article processing charges(APC) work mainly forinternational English
language journals.
• Resources are needed also
for supporting national
language Diamond OA
publishing as a commongood.

What institutional structures need to be changed to foster and create thebenefits from multilingual research in order to ensure diversity, equity
and inclusion?
The incentives and reward
systems must reflect theimportance of multilingualresearch.

At this stage, multilingualism isconsidered by many as a threat
to the publications in English.
And this creates fears
concerning visibility and impact.

Johan Rooryck
Cissi Askwall
Laura Rovelli
Marin Dacos

Funders and universities should
value multilingual publication in
the same way as publication inEnglish. Publication in English
should not be associated withprestige.
Multilingualism recognition in RA;
interoperable and federated OS
infrastructures to nourish evaluation
systems; financial support for the opennessof publications and research data; necessary
infrastructure and training of skilled humanresources.

Including Multilingualism in Research Assessment Reform• Intended or unintended language
priorities in assessment may• Compromise equal opportunities forindividual researchers and institutions• Endanger locally relevant research andknowledge transfer beyond academia• Result in systemic undervaluation of SSH
research compared to STEM fields inassessments and funding• Ensuring that high quality research isvalued regardless of the publishinglanguage entails e.g.:• Taking into account publications outside
the Web of Science and Scopus
databases.
• Engaging sufficiently diverse pool ofexperts and linguistic skills in theassessment panels.

How multilingualism as an essential part of academic culture must beincorporated in behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms?
Authors should take pride in and be
rewarded for publishing multilingually.
Multilingualism is an individual andsocietal asset. There are more
multilingual than monolingual people in
the world: why not scientists?

Laura Rovelli
Johan Rooryck
Marin Dacos

Money talks!

Cissi Askwall

Initiatives: "ES-CIENCIA ;International Alliance ofIndependent Publishers; Asociación
Latinoamericana de Editores Científicos -ALAEC;CLACSO RA proposal: -reward percentage ofpublications in Spanish/Portuguese with respect tothe total output- encourage at least 1 publication in an indigenouslanguage.

This question is central. The transformation of
the research assessment culture ambition torecognize the diversity of research outputs andactivities. We talk about data and software, forexample, but should also recognize
translations.
In the end, multilingualism will be recognized if
it is able to demonstrate true impact.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
To ensure the availability and vitality of multilingual
scientific knowledge in all researchers’ and citizens’ main
languages, following actions are needed from theinternational and national stakeholders:
1. In science policy, recognize the value of multilingualism
and balance international excellence with local
relevance of research
2. In the public funding of Open Access, prioritize scholarled non-profit Diamond OA publishers of journals andbooks in local languages
3. In research assessment reform, recognize and reward
research published in all languages and address
language biases in metrics and expert-assessment.

MORE INFORMATION

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