#Publication in English should not be associated with prestige
👉 Recently, #multilingualism in #scholarlycommunication has emerged as one of the central points of concern in the conversations on responsible #science and #research. Report of EuroScience Open Forum 2022 (#ESOF) panel discussion on challenges of recognizing and supporting multilingual scholarly work in different geographical & organisational contexts.
https://vastuullinentiede.fi/en/news/publication-english-should-not-be-associated-prestige
@fr @ndocist I don't believe the language to be the major problem to solve in the communication between scholars, citizens and decision makers.
Generally citizens and decision makers listen to scientists from their country, which will translate the scientific consensus into their language. This is a good way regarding how the information is provided, much better in my opinion than decision makers and citizens reading the articles themselves; which is what you seem to be implicitly suggesting.
Might help a little bit, I'm unsure this little improvement is worth the effort.
@rastinza @ndocist I think that any initiative to encourage citizens and decision makers to directly access and read scholcom, without the help of scientists, should be promoted. An explanation by scientists could be a real added value, but should not be necessary (filter), keeping in mind that there is not always a consensus among the scientific community. This is kind of modern Ad Fontes process
@fr @ndocist Scholar communications are thought for experts. People who are not experts in the field might misunderstand them or fail to see the bigger picture.
I'm not saying it should be forbidden to the common people to read the articles, that is in fact useful; but an expert explaining the findings is not just added value, it's almost necessary to understand the findings themselves.
That, unless you suggest everyone should become an expert on any topic discussed.
As an example: say they discover a new method to produce ammonia, which is cheaper than the Haber-Bosh process.
I wouldn't suggest people to read articles about that, but rather an expert to explain what it is and why it's important.
That's because to understand the importance of an improvement over the Haber-Bosh process one would first have to read such article, which would be a highly technical physics and chemistry paper, this paper would probably use methodologies developed in other papers, thus to fully understand it you'd have to read some other 10-20 articles, then get informed about the amount of ammonia produced in the world, understand how this ammonia is used, estimate what would be the price to produce the ammonia and how big is the improvement etc. etc.
This is possible, but it is unrealistic to expect everyone to do it. A much better alternative, in my opinion, is having an expert explain all these things; and then if you're interested take a look at the paper to see how this new method works.
@fr @ndocist If you're talking about literature and philology, as well as some fields of history, I do agree that using the local language is advantageous, but that is already being done.
I guess you're talking about things of considerable political and social importance, but the fact that these areas of research are important doesn't make them any less technical.
Then there are some simple experiments whose methodology and results can be easily understood, especially in fields like psychology and economics, but that doesn't make the whole field simple.
These are my assumptions, I don't think it is a good idea in any of these cases.
Especially treating scientific research differently according to the political importance it supposedly could have. This would feel quite dangerous to me actually. If you need to explain something to the public, you have scientific journalists who do just that.
I guess fields of extreme interest at the moment could be: energy production sectors, food production, climate change, prime material crisis, medicine development, migratory demographics. You tell me how these subjects aren't highly technical and complex, probably much more than a paper on a specific chemical process.
