Consent document translation expense hinders inclusive clinical trial enrolment - Nature

The availability of translated consent documents improves recruitment of patients with limited English proficiency to clinical trials, indicating a potentially modifiable barrier to the inclusion of patients with limited English proficiency.

Scientists who don’t speak fluent English get little help from journals, study finds

An analysis of hundreds of journals finds limited efforts to accommodate scientists who are not native English speakers.

English May Be Science’s Native Language, but It’s Not Native to All Scientists

There are talented scientists worldwide who do not speak fluent English. We have to accommodate the language barrier or risk losing their potential

English May Be Science’s Native Language, but It’s Not Native to All Scientists

There are talented scientists worldwide who do not speak fluent English. We have to accommodate the language barrier or risk losing their potential

AI writing tools will not fix academia’s language discrimination problem

Affordable AI-powered writing software offers some hope to scholars unfairly criticised for their imperfect English, but more radical change is required, says Natalia Kucirkova

Publishing in English or Chinese: a qualitative analysis of Chinese researchers’ academic language choice

Non-native language scholars often struggle to choose between English and their native language in scholarly publishing. This study aims to identify the mechanism by which journal attributes influence language choice by investigating the perspectives of 18 Chinese scholars through semi-structured interviews. Drawing on grounded theory, this study develops a model for how journal attributes influence researchers’ language preferences. We find that journal attributes influence researchers’ perceived value which, in turn, affects their particular language choice, with contextual factors playing a moderating role. By examining the motivations underlying Chinese scholars’ language choice, this study provides a critical understanding of the factors shaping their decision-making processes. These findings have significant implications for Chinese scholars, policymakers, and journal operators, shedding light on the issue of discrimination in academic publishing. Addressing these concerns is crucial for fostering a fair and inclusive academic environment.

Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

abstract. Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language

Language barriers in scientific publishing: how many hurdles are there?

Find out more about the barriers non-native English speakers face in scientific publishing, and initiatives that are starting to help.

Assessing diverse values of nature requires multilingual evidence

2nd Helsinki Initiative Webinar on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication | helsinki-initiative.org

OSF

Prestigious journals make it hard for scientists who don’t speak English to get published. And we all lose out

A study of 736 biological science journals showed only a small fraction are making efforts to foster a multilingual scientific community.

The impact of researchers’ perceived pressure on their publication strategies

Abstract. This article investigates researchers’ publication strategies and how their perceived pressure to publish and to obtain external funding are rela

English dominates scientific research – here’s how we can fix it, and why it matters

Around 98% of all research is published in English, posing a serious problem for the global scientific community.

Artificial Intelligence: What the Future Holds for Multilingual Authors and Editing Professionals - Science Editor

Observations and predictions based on two rounds of surveys among primarily Chinese-speaking researchers conducted in early and late 2023. A Tumultuous 2 Years The increasing availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools such as ChatGPT for writing and editing, among other academic tasks, has prompted considerable debate among researchers, universities, publishers, journals, and other stakeholders over the boundaries separating the ethical and unethical use of such tools. Some, such as the Science family of journals and the University of Hong Kong, initially imposed strict restrictions on the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, both deeming the use of AI-generated text as plagiarism.1,2 These restrictions have since been relaxed,3-5 reflecting a general movement in academia, both in education and research, from outright bans to embracing productive and ethical use.  Authors for whom English is not a first language (hereafter, multilingual authors) face greater barriers to publication than their native English-speaking counterparts.6,7 Multilingual authors have traditionally relied on editing or translation services to ensure their manuscripts meet journals’ requirements for high standards of English. However, not all can afford professional language services, and their use increases the costs associated with publishing. Generative AI tools can be a game-changer for multilingual researchers, bringing much-needed equity to academic publishing and eliminating English fluency as a barrier to research dissemination.8  As managers at a company providing (100% human) academic editing services, we were interested in how the authors we work with, the majority of whom are multilingual, perceived the recent developments in AI and […]

Climate Cardinals Plans To Double Its Science Translation Efforts With New Google Backing

The youth-led nonprofit has accomplished quite a bit with almost no funding: translating 2 million words in four years to make scientific literature more accessible to non-English speakers.

Dealing with multilingualism and non-English content in open repositories: Challenges and perspectives

Abstract Several organizations and initiatives have recently called for more support of multilingualism in research to promote epistemic plurality and raise awareness of the adverse effects of an anglocentric research ecosystem. But this support for and practice of multilingualism and linguistic diversity cannot happen in a digital or technological vacuum. Open repositories can play an important role in ensuring that research infrastructures have the ability to implement and promote multilingualism at scale in an Open Science environment. This implementation, however, is complex and does not come without its own theoretical and technical challenges. One of these challenges is to recognize that the implementation of multilingualism in open repositories can hardly be dissociated from wider concerns of discoverability, research assessment practices, and the anglocentric nature of digital infrastructures and metadata standards or protocols. Drawing on the COAR (Coalition of Open Access Repositories) recommendations report produced by the COAR Task Force on Supporting Multilingualism and non-English Content in Repositories, this article presents and critically examines how and why three particular recommendations of this document are particularly well suited to support a decolonial trajectory for the management of multilingualism in open repositories. More specifically, this article discusses the decolonial aspects and praxis underlying guidelines such as declaring the language(s) of the resource and of its metadata, writing personal name/s using the writing system used in the deposited document while providing a persistent identifier to disambiguate author/s identification and, overlapping with the latter, enabling UTF-8 support so as to promote use of the original alphabet / the writing system whenever possible, without negating the possibility to transliterate metadata by means of recognized standards (e.g. ISO). In so doing, we argue that these recommendations enable a multifaceted technology and politics of recovery that promotes a form of linguistic revitalization and strengthens linguistic diversity.  

Multilingual Publishing: Editorial Lunch & Learn

Join us for the next Open Publishing Editorial Lunch and Learn on Multilingual Publishing. This session will be presented by Emma Uhl from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and...

Whose language counts?

This position paper makes a critical intervention in one of the mostly salient sociolinguistic debates of the recent years, that of the integration of multilingual speakers in language ideological research. Although many scholars now recognize the need for decentering the ideal(ized) ‘monolingual native speakers’, they remain the default norm in language ideological research. Indeed, despite our efforts to dismantle our own language ideologies as linguists, the implicit focus on native speakers and monolinguals proceeds to the erasure or invisibilization (Irvine & Gal 2000) of multilinguals. Drawing on research on gender-inclusive language as well as my own empirical study on L2 speakers of German, I show why integrating a higher variety of language users is necessary—not only on ethical grounds, but also on theoretical ones. Altogether, this paper presents the challenges language ideological research still faces despite ongoing efforts to tackle multilingualism and offers possible solutions for language ideological research to become truly inclusive.

Going Open Access: The Attitudes and Actions of Scientific Journal Editors in China

This study aims to investigate the attitudes and actions of scientific journal editors in China towards open access. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 Chinese editors from various scientific journals during September and October of 2022. The results indicate that the editors generally possess knowledge of open access and have implemented an appropriate open access model for their respective journals. However, the Chinese-language journal editors expressed a lack of motivation to adopt open access, unless there is a reform in the mechanism of academic publishing or a policy is imposed. On the other hand, the English-language journal editors acknowledged that they have no other choice but to adopt open access. This study helps us learn about Chinese editors’ understanding and attitudes towards open access, the current status of open access in China’s scientific journals, and the mechanisms of academic publishing in China.