I attended a European 'diamond open access' conference online this week and the architecture of multi-language journals has developed a lot, but there are disagreements and new ideas about a few things.
One is, how universities and employers reward articles published in languages other than English [LOTE]: the anglophone employers and systems seem to find this very hard [many writings in LOTE, including mine, not counted in the UK REF, for example]. This has been overcome, I have found out, in certain settings eg for people teaching in language departments. But in general, it's an English-speaking and writing world, particularly in STEM.
Second, the translation software and algorithms - can we improve the interface off these with published work? Obvs easier with xml/html article presentation than pdf to get a decent but still not perfect translation, but we are not at the stage yet where we would joint-publish those, without substantial human checking first. Journals like ours [Journal of Political Ecology] have always been trilingual, but two-language article versions are still rare. One, in the last year and a half in fact. A lot of work.
Third and this is my own point, English is often the minority language and where this is so, there is an argument to use it too. I have just edited a large book with Matthias Kowasch and we have spent hundreds of hours translating French into English so that knowledge of New Caledonia-Kanaky geographies is substantially improved. It just had to happen, where 80-90% of all social science on those islands is in French and other Pacific peoples largely don't speak it.
Fourth, Open Access and decent copyright licencing improves everything, but everybody knows that already. The ethics of good publishing mean avoid the commercial publishers, to boost the community-run diamond OA journals and avoid the high APCs, even if your government might have paid for them now [as with Elsevier in UK]. The EU and Plan S are close to getting some financial support for the community Diamond journals, but not yet [PlanS is problematic from an equity perspective, as we have said https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.5e24d46d].
Last, The work of people like Arianna Becerril-García, Executive Director, Redalyc/AmeliCA is amazing. Latin America has a whole other architecture of networked and archived journals, mostly not in English.
The struggle against the 'big five' publishers in geography and related disciplines is still very much alive, despite 'transformative agreements' making that harder.
A/Prof. Simon Batterbury | School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences |2.36, 221 Bouverie St, University of Melbourne | 3010 VIC | Australia | simonpjb @unimelb.edu.au +61 383449319
& Visiting Professor, LEC, Lancaster University, UK, Europe
http://www.simonbatterbury.net | Journal of Political Ecology https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/
Socially just publishing outlets https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-decent-open-access-journals/
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Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:26:17 +0200
From: "LEHTONEN , MARKKU JUHANI" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Número en castellano // Cultural Anthropology
I'm absolutely 100% in favour of maximum linguistic (and cultural)
diversity, not least for egoistic reasons: I just find it a lot of fun. The
initiative from Cultural Anthropology is excellent. Yet, I'm also reminded
of the fact that I currently live in a bilingual "country" in which many
consider Spanish, not English, as the oppressor language and culture.
Not sure what to make of this other than to observe that these things are
complicated - and hence
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