Category Archives: oa.multilingualism

Open science: up for a challenge? | Research Information

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“Do you feel, nevertheless, like Open “Science” is not for you as a book publisher in the humanities and social sciences? Wrong! While the use of Crossref DOIs as persistent identifiers for journal articles has become the industry standard, it is still relatively new territory for books and chapters. The metadata registered with most book DOIs is also significantly less rich, usually lacking abstracts and citations, thus providing less text and fewer nodes of connectivity for search engines to work with. This can result in lower discoverability for the main output types – books and chapters – of the humanities and social sciences. ScienceOpen began indexing books and chapters in 2019 and now has over two million records with validated DOIs. 

A quick search for books, however, immediately highlights how slim most of the book metadata available through Crossref is. To help smaller publishers enrich their book metadata, ScienceOpen created the free platform BookMetaHub, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, that can translate metadata from the XML format used for book sellers and libraries, ONIX, into a Crossref-ready format. This richer metadata can help book publishers to benefit from the advantages in discoverability.

Another way to upgrade to Open Science is to explore open and transparent peer review. Just by committing to accept manuscripts that have been posted online as a preprint, publishers can support the research community. Add this information to your journal pages and instructions or write a blog to get the word out: researchers are still sometimes unsure what counts as “previously published.”

In a next step you could agree to consider open peer reviews of preprints as part of your peer review process or to allow your reviewers to sign or post their review reports. ASAPbio offers a wealth of resources for authors and journals around preprint review. And if you decide to choose a fully open or transparent peer review model for your next journal, make sure to give reviews a DOI in the Crossref peer review XML schema to make them citable and discoverable in their own right. There are an increasing number of journals and publishers embracing some form of open review including BioMedCentral, EMBO, Copernicus, eLife, JMIR, F1000 Research, and ScienceOpen. Ross-Hellauer and Görögh (2019) provide some thoughtful guidance for getting started.

Finally, one of the main goals of Open Science is to engage the general public and raise levels of trust in science and academia. Projects range from citizen science participation, plain-language lay summaries, multilingual publishing.

Academic publishers are already engaging with Open Science and driving it forward. But there is more work to be done before a seamless flow of information connects researchers “for the benefits of science and society” and speeds up the pace of innovation to address some of the big challenges that lay before us.”

Wikifunctions is starting up – Diff

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“After three years of development, we are excited to share that Wikifunctions is slowly beginning to roll out. 

Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project, is a new space to collaboratively create and maintain a library of functions. You can think of these functions like recipes for a meal—they take inputs and produce an output (a reliable answer). You might have experienced something similar when using a search engine to find the distance between two locations, the volume of an object, converting two units, and more….

Wikifunctions is a project that allows you to create new functions, run existing functions, and understand how they work. We anticipate that the system will eventually be able to generate sentences, texts, and full articles. Using the simple facts housed in Wikidata, you will be able to write functions that make calculations, provide a person’s age, estimate population densities, and more, and integrate the results into Wikipedia.

Additionally, Wikifunctions allows you to read and implement functions in your native language, be that English, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, or one of the hundreds of other supported languages….”

The New Alexandria Foundation – Rebuilding the ancient world anew, digitally.

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“The objective of New Alexandria is to develop and nurture an open environment for learning, teaching, and research about premodern civilizations that is inclusive, collaborative, and restlessly innovative. Instead of flattening the differences between ancient and current ways of representing the world, we seek to see more clearly the lively unfamiliarity of the ancient way. Instead of selectively extracting elements of ancient life from their historical contexts, we seek a holistic approach that is interdisciplinary and that integrates anthropological and other socially-informed methodologies. The basic rationale is that cultural and human differences are “good to think with,” vital for humanism and even for humanity….

 

 

Our aim is to take the best that we know and think about premodern civilizations and to make it available to anyone with access to the internet by way of a phone, a tablet, or a computer, at home, in a library, in a park, or on a bus. As our data will be free and open for all to use and engage with, so also must our interpretations of it be free and open, and so also the software that we create for accessing it and analyzing it must be free and open….”

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Multilingual Publishing & Scholarship. Abstracts invited by September 15, 2023 | JEP – the journal of electronic publishing

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Which language do you research in? Which language do you publish in? There are ~7,000 known, living languages in use around the world but, increasingly, academic research is communicated primarily in English.

In a 2015 article in The Atlantic, science communicator Adam Huttner-Koros writes: “English is now so prevalent [in research] that in some non-English speaking countries, like Germany, France, and Spain, English-language academic papers outnumber publications in the country’s own language several times over. In the Netherlands, one of the more extreme examples, this ratio is an astonishing 40 to 1.” What, then, are the implications of having a lingua franca for research? Shouldn’t a lingua franca make it easier to learn from each other, to build on each other’s ideas if everyone is reading and writing in the same language? As Huttner-Kronos and Sean Perera point out, “communicating science in English promotes […] norms of describing and defining the natural world that are intrinsic to the English language, and ideologies that are conversant to its native speakers” (2016). Language is, in so many ways, world-shaping; language can define one’s experience through naming, metaphor, reflection, representation. Communicating all research in one single language means that language shapes the research, too. Language shapes what is possible to express, contextualize, or reveal. If research is primarily communicated in English, that research is bound by English-language contexts and worldviews. Furthermore, among the contexts influenced by language are publishing models and structures.

Such a hegemonic system promotes epistemic injustice through language dominance. Moreover, privileging the English language in scholarly communication marginalizes and disadvantages researchers who are not first language English speakers, or not English language speakers at all, both reinscribing a colonial framework for knowledge production and limiting diverse academic research development. Even more, even a multilingual setting where, for instance, English, French, and Spanish coexist still reifies imperial orderings of the world.

This call for papers for a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) asks: How do we integrate and practice the value of multilingualism into a more equitable and epistemically just scholarly communication and publishing system?

The co-editors of this special issue–Janneke Adema, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Élika Ortega–invite abstracts for papers of ~6,000-8,000 words that explore multilingual publishing and scholarship, including issues of:

·      translation (text and / or multimedia) 
·      English-language dominance 
·      multilingual theory and praxis
·      epistemic justice and knowledge equity 
·      digital monolingualism 
·      infrastructure, tools, and best practices 
·      access and minimal computing 
·      language-specific writing styles and epistemologies
·      historical precedents and trajectories
·      experimental knowledge production 
·      linguistic, national, and infrastructural contexts
·      Non-imperial and indigenous language epistemologies

For this special issue, we are able to accept papers written in English, Spanish, and French. When submitting an abstract, please indicate if you are interested in pursuing a translation option and we can discuss possibilities further. Please also include a note that your abstract is for consideration in the Multilingual Publishing & Scholarship special issue. Abstract submissions are due on September 15th 2023 and should be addressed to JEP co-editors, Janneke Adema and Alyssa Arbuckle, via jep.editors@gmail.com.

Full papers of accepted abstracts will be due by December 31st 2023.

Please direct any questions to JEP co-editors, Janneke Adema and Alyssa Arbuckle, via jep.editors@gmail.com.

“Open Access Publishing for English Language Learners” by David Patent, Sarah Tomlinson et al.

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Abstract:  Open access publishing for English language learners reinforces the notion that valuable perspectives can be shared with the academic community before attaining an idealized threshold of English language proficiency. This report offers a description of three case studies that illustrate how open access repositories can be used to provide publishing opportunities for English language learners and stimulate interest in academic writing. Historical background on open scholarship publishing is included, along with implications for policy. The report expands on a panel discussion presented by the authors at the 2023 EnglishUSA Professional Development Conference.

 

Opening access to complex texts: Cataloging the Ottoman-Turkish collection | Yale Library

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“Yale Library has in its collection 567 Ottoman-Turkish objects, which until now have been somewhat hidden from view. The Ottoman-Turkish language is an amalgam of Arabic, Persian, and modern Turkish. Its translation requires specialized skills, which has long presented library staff members with a roadblock to making them discoverable in the library’s searchable database.

Following their 2019 symposium about these manuscripts, held at Sterling Memorial Library, Özgen Felek, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Roberta Dougherty, librarian for Middle East Studies and curator for the Near East Collection, proposed a solution. They suggested enlisting the help of graduate students to translate and catalog the texts. Felek had already introduced several of these valuable manuscripts to students in her course “Reading and Research in Ottoman History and Literature.”

The cataloging effort began in fall 2022. Ays?e C?ic?ek Ünal, a graduate student in the Department of History, stepped in to help identify and describe the first 25 manuscripts Felek had selected as the most logical starting point for the project.

Dating from the mid-15th to early 20th centuries, the materials in the Ottoman-Turkish collection include works of history, poetry, literature, Islamic law, medical texts, dictionaries, and hand-annotated account books.

The work of deciphering and cataloging these complex texts continues. In addition to guidance from Felek and Dougherty, Ünal receives support from Agnieszka Rec, an early materials cataloger at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which is the repository for the collection. Yasemin Sönmez, a Turkish calligrapher and independent scholar, and other graduate students also assist. Thanks to their efforts so far, nearly 78 of these important manuscripts have already been cataloged….”

Project Retain. Enabling the dissemination of knowledge. – SPARC Europe

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“Europe has seen a significant growth in activity to establish and advance open access (OA) policies over the last decade. However, copyright has been the thorn in the side of many authors, funders, and their institutions who wish to publish OA, since many publisher policies and processes are no longer fit for purpose. 

Today, we require the rights to publish, share, adapt, and reuse material for research, educational, or multilingual needs….”

Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe | Zenodo

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“This report investigates the current landscape of non-legislative policy practices affecting researchers and authors in the authors’ rights and licensing domain. It is an outcome of research conducted by Project Retain led by SPARC Europe, as part of the Knowledge Rights 21 programme. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for institutional policymakers, funders and legislators, and publishers. 

It is accompanied by the study dataset.

This project was funded by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.”

DIAMAS deliverable: D3.1 IPSP Best Practices Quality evaluation criteria, best practices, and assessment systems for Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) | Zenodo

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“This report outlines existing quality evaluation criteria, best practices, and assessment systems for IPSPs developed by international associations, RPOs, governments, and international databases. It also analyses academic literature on research evaluation of IPSPs, assessment criteria and indicators. The analysis matrix includes the following categories, which will also be the core components of EQSIP: 

Funding: description of the funding model, OA business model, transparency in listing all funding sources, etc. 

Ownership and governance: legal ownership, mission, and governance.

Open science practices: OA policy, copyright and licensing, open peer review, data availability, new approaches to research assessment, etc.

Editorial quality, editorial management, and research integrity.  

Technical service efficiency: technical strength, interoperability – metadata, ISSN, PIDs, machine readability, and accessible  journal website. 

Visibility, including indexation, communication, marketing and impact.

Equity, Diversity  and Inclusion (EDI): multilingualism, gender equity….”

COAR community consultation on managing non-English and multilingual content in repositories – COAR

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“COAR welcomes your input on 16 draft recommendations for managing non-English and multilingual content in repositories. These recommendations were developed by a COAR Task Force and are meant to provide good practice advice on depositing, managing, and curating multilingual and non-English language content in repositories.

Multilingualism is a critical characteristic of a healthy, inclusive, and diverse research communications landscape. Publishing in a local language ensures that the public in different countries has access to the research they fund, and also levels the playing field for researchers who speak different languages. However, multilingualism presents a particular challenge for the discovery of research outputs. Although researchers and other information seekers may only be able to read in one or two languages, they want to know about all the relevant research in their area, regardless of the language in which it is published. Yet, discovery systems such as Google Scholar and other scholarly indexes tend to provide access only to the content available in the language of the user.

The recommendations define good practices for metadata, multilingual keywords, user interfaces, translations, formats, licenses, and indexing that will improve the visibility and discovery of repository content in a variety of languages along with implementation guidance for the repository community….”

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

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“Helsinki Initiative organizes a webinar series on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication with speakers representing different expert communities and strands of work. This event includes three presentations ranging from language barriers in conservation science to machine translation in scholarly communication and mapping the global journal landscape.”

We won’t beat predatory journals by blacklisting them | Times Higher Education (THE)

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“The Web of Science’s recent decision to delist two journals published by the Switzerland-based open access publisher MDPI, among dozens of others, follows the appearance of a list of more than 400 allegedly predatory MDPI journals on the predatoryreports.org website several weeks earlier.

While some welcomed Predatory Reports’ move, I did not. As someone who has studied so-called predatory publishing for almost a decade, I believe that creating such lists doesn’t promote integrity or trust in science. Likewise, it will not solve a key reason for the creation of journals of questionable quality: the pressure on academics to produce more and more papers….

But when discussing predatory journals, let us not reduce this phenomenon to “publishing fake results” or “providing low-quality peer review”. Such phenomena also happen in journals published by the most prestigious publishing houses. What the concept of predatory journals actually reveals is the deep inequalities between the scientific working conditions in countries close to the “centre” of global science, such as the UK and US, and those on its periphery.

 

 

 

All lists of predatory journals have concentrated almost entirely on English-language journals published in non-English-speaking countries. As a result, their usefulness is limited because although many science policy instruments promote English publications, the lion’s share of researchers still publish in their local languages….”

Europeana Translate Event – How machine translation & multilingual access impacts cultural heritage | Europeana Pro

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“This online event will present the Europeana Translate project outcomes, describe the methodology followed, the results obtained, and the impact of machine translation on improving user experience in the cultural heritage sector. Speakers will also reflect on machine translation and multilinguality in the cultural heritage domain and discuss this from a broader perspective with external insights.

You can expect presentations about the OCCAM (OCR, ClassificAtion & Machine Translation) project by Tom Vanallemeersch; information about the results of the EnrichEuropeana+ project by Sergiu Gordea and Henk Vanstappen, who will explore the automated translations of heritage data in the Bruges’ project Grenzeloos. This will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A where the speakers, joined by some of the Europeana Translate partners, will discuss the theme of machine translation and multilinguality further. Participants will be invited to share questions and perspective on automated translations in the cultural heritage domain and possible challenges for the future….”

Roundtable on Diamond OA and Multilingualism, March 28, 2023, 13:00-14:45 CET | Responsible Research @ The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

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OPERAS and Helsinki Initiative organize a Roundtable on Diamond OA and Multilingualism 14:00-15:45 (13:00-14:45 CET).

14:00-14:10 Opening (Janne Pölönen, TSV) and presentation of onsite participants
14:10-14:50 Keynote by Pierre Mounier on Diamond Open Access infrastructure (+ immediate Q&A on the presentation)
14:50-15:45 Roundtable discussion including Pierre and Finnish OA scholarly publishing, communication and funding experts and stakeholders, with comments (5-7 mins) by

Sami Niinimäki (Ministry of Education and Culture)
Pirjo Hiidenmaa (Professor of Non-fiction Studies and Non-fiction Writing, University of Helsinki)
Pekka Olsbo (FUN Finnish University Libraries’ Network, University of Jyväskylä)
Petja Kauppi (Elore – Journal of the Finnish Folklore Society)
Mikael Laakso (Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, Hanken school of Economics)

On site participation at Tieteiden talo by invitation only (inquiries by email janne.polonen@tsv.fi).

Online participation on Zoom: https://tsv-fi.zoom.us/j/88996643682?pwd=UlNwOTF4dEhUMUdFRitXTjVrc0ptUT09

Pierre Mounier is deputy director of OpenEdition, a comprehensive infrastructure based in France for open access publication and communication in the humanities and social sciences. OpenEdition offers several platforms for journals, scientific announcements, academic blogs, and, finally, books, in different languages and from different countries. Pierre Mounier is also one of the coordinators of OPËRAS, the european infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and the humanities and is, with Eelco Ferwerda, co-director of the Directory of Open Access Books.

OPERAS (open scholarly communication in the European research area for social sciences and humanities) is the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities.

Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication aims to encourage sharing research results beyond academia, support the national publication channels that enable multilingual publication, and promote multilingualism in the assessment and funding processes of research.

 

Measuring Back: Bibliodiversity and the Journal Impact Factor brand. A Case study of IF-journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report. | Zenodo

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Abstract:  Little attention has been devoted to whether the Impact Factor (IF) can be considered a responsible metric in light of bibliodiversity. This paper critically engages with this question in measuring the following variables of IF journals included in the 2021 Journal CItation Reports and examining their distribution: publishing models (hybrid, Open Access with or without fees, subscription), world regions, language(s) of publication, subject categories, publishers, and the prices of article processing charges (APC) if any. Our results show that the quest for prestige or perceived quality through the IF brand poses serious threats to bibliodiversity. The IF brand can indeed hardly be considered a responsible metric insofar as it perpetuates publishing concentration, maintains a domination of the Global North and its attendant artificial image of mega producer of scholarly content, does not promote linguistic diversity, and de-incentivizes fair and equitable open access by entrenching fee-based OA delivery options with rather high APCs.