Promoting balanced multilingualism in open science and scholarly communication - EC Policy Brief

This policy brief outlines OPERAS’ efforts to foster “balanced multilingualism” as a cornerstone of Open Science, equitable knowledge dissemination, and trust in research. Balanced multilingualism seeks to challenge the dominance of English while recognising its role as a lingua franca, promoting a dynamic approach that values diverse languages for different research purposes. OPERAS supports multilingual scholarly communication through initiatives such as national publishing infrastructures, discovery platforms like GoTriple, translation tools like Mondaecus, and equitable open-access publishing projects (DIAMAS, ALMASI). The brief highlights recommendations to strengthen multilingual publishing policies, bibliodiversity, translation recognition, technology-aided content production, and inclusive research assessment, aiming to enhance accessibility, collaboration, and intellectual diversity across languages and disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities and beyond. This policy brief is currently under review by the European Commission.