---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 9/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:11:33.946594+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Open science infrastructure ===
The development of open science infrastructure or "community-controlled infrastructure" has become a major policy issue in the open science movement. In the 2010s, the expansion of commercial scientific infrastructure led to major acknowledgment of the fragility of open scholarly publishing and open archives. The concept of open science infrastructure emerged in 2015 with the publication of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures. In November 2021, a UNESCO recommendation acknowledged open science infrastructure as one of the four pillars of open science, along with open science knowledge, open engagement of societal actors, and open dialogue with other knowledge systems. UNESCO called for sustained investment and funding: "open science infrastructures are often the result of community-building efforts, which are crucial for their long-term sustainability and therefore should be not-for-profit and guarantee permanent and unrestricted access to all public to the largest extent possible." Examples of open science infrastructure include indexes, publishing platforms, shared databases, and computer grids.
Open infrastructures have supported linguistic diversity in science. The leading free software for scientific publishing, Open Journal Systems, is available in 50 languages; it is widespread among non-commercial open-access journals. A landscape study was conducted by the SPARC alliance in 2021; it shows that European open science infrastructures "provide access to a range of language content of local and international significance." In 2019, leading open science infrastructures endorsed the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, and they thus committed to "protect national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research." Signatories include the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), Latindex, OpenEdition, Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS), and SPARC Europe.
In contrast with commercial indexes, the DOAJ does not prescribe the use of English. As a consequence, only half of the journals indexed are published primarily in English; this is a sharp contrast with the overwhelming prevalence of English in commercial indexes such as the Web of Science (more than 95% in English). Six languages are represented by more than 500 journals: Spanish (2776 journals), Portuguese (1917 journals), Indonesian (1329 journals), French (993 journals), Russian (733 journals), and Italian (529 journals). Most of this language diversity is due to non-commercial journals (or diamond open access); 25.7% of these publications accept contributions in Spanish, compared with only 2.4% of journals based on an article processing charge (APC). In 2020-2022, "for English articles in DOAJ journals, 21% are in non-APC journals, but for articles in languages other than English, this percentage is a massive 86%."
Non-English open infrastructures have experienced significant growth; as of 2022, "national repositories and databases are growing everywhere (see the databases such as Latindex in Latin America, or the new repositories in Asia, China, Russia, India)". This development opens up new research opportunities for the study of multilingualism in a scientific context. It will become increasingly feasible to study the "differences between locally published research in non-English speaking contexts and English-speaking international authors".

=== Multilingualism and social impact ===
Publication on open-access platforms has created new incentives for publishing in a local language. In commercial indexes, non-English publications were penalized by the lack of international reception, and they had a significantly lower impact factor. Without a paywall, a local language publication can find its specific audience among a large non-academic public who may be less proficient in English.
During the 2010s, quantitative studies began to highlight the positive impact of local languages on the reuse of open-access resources in nations such as Finland, Québec, Croatia, and Mexico. A study of the Finnish platform Journal.fi shows that the audience for Finnish-language articles is significantly more diverse: "in case of the national language publications students (42%) are clearly the largest group, and besides researchers (25%), also private citizens (12%) and other experts (11%)". By contrast, English-language publications attract mostly professional researchers. Because of ease of access, open science platforms in a local language can also achieve more global reach. The French-Canadian journal consortium Érudit has a primarily international audience, with less than one third of readers coming from Canada.
A strong network of open science infrastructures has been developed in South America (e.g., Scielo and Redalyc) and the Iberian region; this has contributed to the resurgence of Spanish and Portuguese in international scientific communication. Regional growth may also be associated with the boom in open-access publishing. Both Portuguese and Spanish play important roles in open-access publishing (as do Brazil and Spain themselves).
Although multilingualism has been either neglected or even discriminated against in commercial databases, it has been valued as central to the social impact of open science platforms and infrastructure. In 2015, Juan Pablo Alperin introduced a systematic measure of social impact that highlighted the relevance of scientific content for local communities: "By looking at a broad range of indicators of impact and reach, far beyond the typical measures of one article citing another, I argue, it is possible to gain a sense of the people that are using Latin American research, thereby opening the door for others to see how it has touched those individuals and communities. In this context, new indicators for linguistic diversity have been proposed. Proposals include the PLOTE index and the Linguistic Diversity Index. As of 2022, however, they have had "limited traction in the scholarly anglophone literature". Comprehensive indicators of the local impact of research remain largely non-existent; "many aspects of research cannot be measured quantitatively, especially its sociocultural impact."