The geopolitics of scholarly communication: multiple languages and alphabets
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
Title |
| |
Title of Series | ||
Number of Parts | 41 | |
Author | ||
License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
Identifiers | 10.5446/60383 (DOI) | |
Publisher | ||
Release Date | ||
Language | ||
Producer | ||
Production Year | 2022 | |
Production Place | Kyiv, Ukraine |
Content Metadata
Subject Area | |
Genre |
39
40
41
00:00
Computer animation
06:47
Computer animation
13:09
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
And I would like to talk about geopolitics of scholarly communication and multilingualism in science in regard to research assessment and evaluation on science, evaluation of researchers and institutions. And I would like to start from a very clear
00:27
message that research must be communicated in multiple languages and access to research and greater interaction between science and society can only be possible if research is
00:43
communicated in multiple languages and what is very important including those actually used and speech in writing locally. And of course we can ask why do we need multilingual scholarly communication? Actually on the European level this question is very often raised. So the first,
01:09
the most clear answer is that we must remember that almost half of Europeans cannot speak any foreign language to hold enough a conversation and only a little more than one third are able to
01:23
do so in English. So this is extremely important that research is communicated in various languages not only exclusively in English and we must promote such infrastructures,
01:41
solutions of research assessment which are in line with this idea of multiple languages in science. Of course it doesn't mean that we have to translate everything into local languages but it means that we should recognize that good quality research can be published
02:04
in various languages. And on this map prepared on the basis of research conducted with my colleagues from European network for research evaluation in social sciences and humanities I showed the results of couple of European countries which used national research information
02:26
systems and on the basis of the data publication we calculated what share of researchers from social sciences published their articles in at least two languages in just three-year periods.
02:44
And as you can see over 60 percent of researchers from social sciences in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovenia published the article in two sometimes three or four languages whereas in Norway and Finland the share is lower. It is important picture because this picture is
03:06
focused on researchers not on single publications because when we look into publications we will see that Polish and Czech researchers publish less papers in English than their colleagues from
03:24
Belgium or Denmark but we do publish in various languages and what is very important we use various alphabets and the solutions of research evaluation should support it. So what can we do to improve this situation and promote recognizing multi-linguities in science
03:47
in various research evaluation initiatives? In 2019 with various colleagues we have founded health thinking initiative on multilingual in scholarly communication.
04:03
Currently this initiative is signed by almost 1000 individuals and organizations like European University Association and DOI, OPRAS and universities Norway. This initiative serves to promote the idea that science is communicated in various languages, we can publish results in all
04:27
languages we use but we need to have various infrastructures and solutions which support this idea. And the main idea which grounds the health thinking initiative on multilingualism in
04:44
scholarly communication is that language should be a non-issue in assessment and researchers should be recognized and rewarded according to the results and the impact of their research. Naturally having one universal common language like English in science is useful because of
05:07
this we can communicate to date translated, translate my talk in Ukraine but at the same time we need to have solutions which support communicating with local societies which
05:23
express themselves in their own languages. And because of this health thinking initiative promotes the approach that all actors involved in research assessment should make sure that in
05:41
the process of expert-based evaluation high quality research is valued regardless of the publishing language or publication channel. When we don't use expert but last weeks
06:01
make that publications and also book publications in all languages are adequately taken into account in this assessment exercise and what is extremely important when we choose evaluators for our research assessment we have to take into account their language skill because having to
06:24
assess publications in various languages we have to have evaluators which are able to read those papers. And what is also very important we cannot sustain the infrastructure of
06:42
multilingual publishing if we don't control the key scholarly communication channels because big publishers are not interested in supporting local publishers, local journals. This is why
07:02
we have to reclaim some key communication channels like journals or publishers and those channels should be again governed by academic community and learning societies. It is not possible to have fully multilingual scholarly communications and rely only on big publishers to which we pay
07:28
too much money for various APCs or other charges regarding publishing of our own papers. And I would like to stress a very important
07:46
thing which is highlighted by the HealthSync initiative. We have to protect national infrastructure for publishing in local languages especially in regard to open access. Of course open access is the idea which we should follow and implement as much as possible
08:06
but sometimes transformation into open access is connected with transformation to publishing only in English. We must make sure that non-profit journals and book publishers have both sufficient
08:25
resources to publish in local languages and the support needed to maintain high standards of quality control and research integrity. And I would like to highlight that on the basis of
08:41
various studies in Europe but also in other countries and continents we see that multilingualism not only in social sciences and humanities but also in technical and medical fields is integral to accessibility to science and knowledge and now is a key part of the European research
09:06
assessment reform. And saying this I refer to the conclusions on research assessment and implementation of open science published this June by the Council of the European Union.
09:25
And the Council acknowledges the role of multilingualies in the context of science communication and welcomes initiatives which promote multilingualism such as HealthSync initiative.
09:41
And it is also visible in the document published by UNESCO recommendation on open science where multilingual scientific knowledge is important to make science actually and really open and according to UNESCO members state should encourage should encourage and promote
10:08
multilingualism in the practice of science in scientific publications and in academic communications. And as I mentioned it's not only a part of the reform in Europe but also in Latin
10:23
America. A new research assessment towards a socially relevant science in Latin America and the Caribbean published June this year in principle 8 writes very clearly that they endorse the HealthSync initiative because multilingualism is important to communicate
10:44
socially relevant research and contributes to sustaining cultural diversity. So this idea must be implemented on the local and also national level. And I would like to share with you as a conclusion some practical implications for research assessment. Those implications are
11:04
explained in the chapter on multilingualism of social sciences in the handbook of research assessment in the social sciences but those guidelines or implications are important actually for all fields. So we should follow DORA declaration and assess research quality
11:26
based on content and not the language of publication. And we should take into account that there are various language biases and they are embedded in evaluation and we should be
11:42
aware of this and we should fight with this. And publications in all languages need to be taken into account in various evaluation exercises. We should require language skills from our evaluations and we also should in various evaluations where it is possible take into
12:06
account not only peer review publications but also some professional and publications for general audience because various such publications are written and published in local languages and they do a lot of work for promoting research. And we should not focus
12:29
only on international citation indexes like Web of Science or Scopus but we should develop and support national citation indexes because only thanks to this we are able to say something
12:44
about our national science in terms of bibliometrics. Thank you very much for having this opportunity to share this insight how multilingual is important for sustaining
13:04
open science and also for reforming research evaluation in Europe. Thank you.
Recommendations
Series of 13 media