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

By Henry Arenas-Castro, The University of Queensland

For the first time in history, a single language dominates global scientific communication. But the actual production of knowledge continues to be a multilingual enterprise.

The use of English as the norm poses challenges for scholars from regions where English is not widely spoken. They must decide whether to publish in English for global visibility, or publish in their native language to make their work accessible to local communities. And when they work in English, they end up expending more time and effort writing and revising papers than their native English-speaking peers.

As gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, academic publishers play a key role in helping or hindering the participation of a multilingual scientific community. So how are they doing?

We reviewed the policies of 736 journals in the biological sciences and discovered the great majority are making only minimal efforts to overcome language barriers in academic publishing. Our research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

A wide range of inclusive policies

Linguistically inclusive policies come in many forms, and can be implemented at each stage of the editorial process. They might aim to make publishing more multilingual. Alternatively – if sticking with English – they may aim to reduce the burden on non-native English speakers.

Allowing papers to be published in more than one language at the same time would resolve the dilemma many non-native English speaking scholars face about communicating locally or globally. However, only 7% of the journals we surveyed allowed this possibility. (A further 11% will allow multilingual versions of an abstract alone.)

Another possibility would be to implement machine translation tools to make versions of an article available in multiple languages on a journal’s website. There has been recent progress in this area, but only 11% of journals we surveyed have put it into practice.

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