Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funder accepts grant applications in multiple national languages and translates summaries for cross-panel review.
- Is an instance
A journal publishes article abstracts in three languages including the language of the study population.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An assessment policy that treats non-English publications as automatically less valuable.
- Not an instance
A search strategy in a systematic review that excludes non-English sources without justification.
Editorial commentary
English has become the de facto language of international academic publishing, yet most of the world’s researchers and publics work primarily in other languages. Multilingual scholarship advocates for: language diversity in publishing venues; multilingual abstracts and summaries; recognition of non-English outputs in assessment; translation support; and infrastructure that makes non-English research discoverable.
The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism
The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication was published in 2019 by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, the Committee for Public Information, the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, Universities Norway, and the COST Action ENRESSH network. It makes three core recommendations: reward researchers for disseminating in multiple languages rather than penalising it in assessment; protect and fund national-language publishing infrastructure as part of the OA transition rather than letting it wither; and make research evaluation criteria language-neutral so a non-English output is not automatically scored as lesser. The Initiative runs an ongoing #InAllLanguages advocacy campaign built around these three points.
How this differs from bibliodiversity and Global-South publishing
Multilingual scholarship names the language dimension specifically; it overlaps heavily with, but is narrower than, the broader bibliodiversity principle (which also covers business-model and geographic diversity) and Global-South publishing (which covers institutional ownership and research-priority questions beyond language alone). A journal can be multilingual without being diamond OA, and diamond without being multilingual — the two reform agendas are allied but distinct.
References
- Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, 2019 (helsinki-initiative.org). UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, 2021.
Also known as
Linguistic diversity in scholarship · Multilingual research communication
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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