Multilingualism

Abstract

As a companion document to the toolsuite on multilingualism, these guidelines provide some practical suggestions to help Diamond OA publishers and service providers integrate multilingualism into their activities. These guidelines include the recommendations laid out in the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS)  (Rico-Castro  et al. 2024). Given that each Diamond OA publisher and service provider may be at a different stage of integrating multilingual practices, and that each Diamond OA publisher and service provider may have different resources at their disposal, the guidelines have been organized into three broad categories:

A. Easy to accomplish: So-called “quick wins”, these are practices that can be implemented relatively quickly and easily and need few resources.

B. Moderate investments for the mid-term: These practices may require more effort or resources to implement than the “quick wins”, but overall these investments are relatively modest and can be achieved without significant costs.

C. Longer term goals: These practices may require additional planning or resources, or may need to be developed over a longer period of time.

Within each category, an attempt has been made to organize the suggestions from most easy to accomplish/least resource intensive to most challenging/resource-intensive. It is important to note that this list of guidelines is suggestive, rather than comprehensive, and the suggestions may not be equally relevant to all IPSPs. 

Main Text

As a companion document to the toolsuite on multilingualism, these guidelines provide some practical suggestions to help Institutional Publishers and Service Providers (IPSPs) integrate multilingualism into their activities. hese guidelines include the recommendations laid out in the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS)  (Rico-Castro et al. 2024). Given that each IPSP may be at a different stage of integrating multilingual practices, and that each IPSP may have different resources at their disposal, the guidelines have been organized into three broad categories:

A. Easy to accomplish:

1. Develop a policy statement confirming that submissions within the thematic scope and language of the journal are accepted from all potential authors and that decision-making concerning content is without regard to their language background.
2. Include a statement on the peer review feedback form indicating that linguistic quality alone is not a sufficient reason for rejecting a submission.
3. Develop a policy requiring authors to report whether the research data are sensitive to language.
4. Identify affordable, reputable editing and translation services with whom your organization can work effectively and make the contact details for these services available to potential authors.
5. Raise awareness about unconscious linguistic bias and point authors, peer reviewers, editors and journal staff members towards existing relevant resources to help them minimize their own unconscious bias.
6. Raise awareness about clear writing and translation friendly style, and point authors towards existing resources that can be used to develop (machine) translation friendly abstracts and articles.
7. Revise the content of the website, guidelines, policies and other communications so that they are written in a (machine) translation friendly style (i.e., clear and unambiguous language). Ensure that all future communications are also prepared in a translation friendly style.
8. Raise awareness about linguistic citation diversity (i.e., citing work in other languages), and point authors to existing guidelines about how to cite work in other languages.
9. Develop a policy requiring authors to submit a linguistic citation diversity statement with their manuscript.
10. Include linguistic citation diversity as an item to be evaluated on peer review feedback forms.
11. Integrate an automatic translation tool (e.g. via a translation widget) into the website, with appropriate caveats.

B. Moderate investments for the mid-term:

1. Request and publish plain language summaries (written in a translation friendly style) alongside scientific abstracts on the website and/or in journal articles.
2. Publish abstracts in at least two languages.
3. Develop (or refine) clear guidelines regarding permission to publish the same or similar works in other languages elsewhere (with acknowledgement of the original publication). Strive to be as permissive as possible and make sure that the guidelines are easy for authors to find and understand.
4. Set goals for diverse linguistic representation among editorial board members and peer reviewers, and monitor progress towards the goals.
5. Create an explicit recognition mechanism to credit translators for their work (e.g. include a by-line field under the author’s name, or generate a certificate as some publishers already do for peer reviewers).
6. Deliver peer review training sessions or provide peer review guidelines in multiple languages.

C. Longer term goals: 

1. Publish abstracts and full-texts in two or more languages in the same document or as separate documents, if the authors provide the translations.
2. Develop a mechanism for collecting and monitoring the number/proportion of abstracts and full texts that are multilingual and make this information available.
3. Publish content in a machine-translation friendly format (e.g. in HTML instead of only in PDF) to make it easier for researchers who want to engage with the content via machine translation tools.
4. Translate the website, policies, guidelines, and calls for papers into at least one additional language and ensure that the same information is provided in all languages.
5. Provide English-language metadata in cases where the language of the text is not English.
6. Subsidize or fully support professional translation and language-check services for authors.

Related toolsuite articles

• Multilingualism

References 

• Consortium of the DIAMAS project. (2024). The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12179619

Further reading

• Charlesworth Author Services. Acceptable secondary publication: Publishing the same research in multiple languages. https://www.cwauthors.com/article/acceptable-secondary-publication-publishing-the-same-research-in-multiple-languages 
• American Chemical Society. ACS Authoring Services, 
• Mount Saint Vincent University Library & Archives. APA Citation Style: Working with Foreign Language Materials. https://libguides.msvu.ca/apa/foreign 
• Knowledge Works Global Bias awareness in scholarly publishing. https://www.kwglobal.com/blog/2023/4/26/bias-awareness-in-scholarly-publishing 
• Dalhousie University. Citation Diversity: An Introduction. https://dal.ca.libguides.com/c.php?g=725994&p=5272267#s-lg-box-wrapper-19595845 
• University of Florida. Improve transparency: Craft a university statement. https://ufl.pb.unizin.org/deipublishing/chapter/improve-transparency/ 
• European Association of Science Editors (EASE). EASE Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific Articles to be Published in English.  https://ease.org.uk/publications/author-guidelines-authors-and-translators/ 
• Cybergeo : European journal of geography. Good practice guide for authors: How to write metadata (with a focus on multilingualism) https://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/40416?file=1 
• Taylor & Francis Editor Resources. Increasing Diversity on Your Editorial Board. https://editorresources.taylorandfrancis.com/the-editors-role/managing-editorial-boards/598-2/  
• University of Texas Libraries. Multilingual metadata. https://cloud.wikis.utexas.edu/wiki/spaces/utlmetadata/pages/28278856/Multilingual+Metadata 

Licensing

This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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