Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Mark Huskisson. Mark is the Co-Chair of the Assembly of the Commons for the European Research Infrastructure, OPERAS, and strategic adviser to PKP | Public Knowledge Project. He is an independent consultant, speaker, and contractor at The Husk Agency.

This is the first article of three in a guest series reflecting on the main themes and ideas gathered and discussed at the Munin Conference at the end of 2024.

The Munin Conference is named after one of Odin’s ravens who was sent out to fly around the world to gather knowledge and understanding and the sessions are built to operate with this vision – to seek thought and wisdom from around the world and to have it brought back 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle to UiT The Arctic University of Norway each year.

A word used widely in Trømso was bibliodiversity. It is a word that makes sense when you hear it, but it is not a word that is fully understood, yet it is increasingly used in policy making and strategic planning worldwide. I used the term widely in a Scholarly Kitchen article back in 2022, but failed to define it in a way that would have been more helpful.

So, extending the spirit of the raven Munin who tells Odin all that he sees on his daily flight around the nine realms (why Odin was the wisest of the gods), I think it is a good time to journey beyond our realm and assess why bibliodiversity is at the heart of global scholarly communication and why it should be a critical word for all of us in The Scholarly Kitchen.

blue wooden door surrounded on all sides by books
Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

Coined in the 1990s as cultural diversity applied to the world of books and echoing biodiversity, it simply identifies healthy diversity as a critical characteristic of any thriving ecosystem. The idea is that bibliodiversity is needed to represent the full gamut of scientific endeavor to address the complex local and global challenges we face as humans and as a society.

We may find ourselves as a community agreeing that this is a good thing and one reason we emerge bleary-eyed for work each morning to ‘do science’ and to disseminate the resulting knowledge for the betterment of society. However, a recent call to action to improve upon and foster bibliodiversity arose in response to the belief that the publishing industry has incentivized the homogenization of content, format, and platforms; producing a monoculture due, at least in part, to the way the publishing industry and academia rely so heavily on metrics, research evaluations, and the resulting rankings as proxies for quality and performance.

A core problem of this monoculture of academic content is the reduction in the ability for a portion of the world to read or actively publish scholarly content, which leads to gaps and blind spots within the global knowledgebase. When we do not account for, or record, any section of humanity, the reduced diversity narrows our collective story. The missing data becomes ‘unseen’ and our shared contingent beliefs and assumed norms become passively accepted through our daily practice – our doxa or shared common knowledge.

One historical and ongoing identifiable lack of diversity in academic content that has produced a significant and enduring data gap affects half of the world’s population – girls and women.

The gender gap exists because data has been primarily sourced from boys and men (usually white men) creating a deficit of informative data sources on women that leads to persistent gaps in our knowledgebase that affect the solutions and policies we design to address global societal problems.

Caroline Criado Perez’s highly recommended book Invisible Women demonstrates how data that is based on male bodies, male preferences, and typical male behaviors – allied to the lack of comprehensive and disaggregated data on the experiences of girls and women – has created a pervasive bias with profound effects on women’s lives. Similarly, the science gender gap shows how deeply ingrained the bias against women is in science, influencing who receives credit, funding, and citations.

These gaps or lack of inclusivity in the data within scholarly communication and in the published literature negatively impact every aspect of life and society as a whole. The result is a tacit understanding and felt sense of how the world works – “knowledge that goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Pierre Bourdieu).

Inequalities become enlarged because we fail to recognize the biases inherent within our ecosystem.

It is these gaps and biases in our tacit, unsaid understanding – our shared belief in the institution of publishing for what is legitimate and what pertains to quality – that exclude marginalized voices. The call for bibliodiversity asks us to assess and challenge the unsaid assumptions in our profession so that marginalized voices can be heard and counted in the literature and academic content.

The English language is now an assumed norm, passively accepted by most of us as the lingua franca of science and in the scholarly publishing industry. In a recent article, COPE estimated that 98% of modern scholarly literature is written in English (recent research by Vincent Larivière on OpenAlex data suggests that it may be nearer 87%) while only a fifth of the world’s population speaks it. Therefore, it is not surprising that multilingualism is a core tenet of the call for greater bibliodiversity. Non-English speakers face significant barriers to accessing and creating scholarly content.

As far back as the 1960s, Eugene Garfield identified the benefits of publishing in a single language, as did Scott Montgomery in Does Science Need a Global Language more recently. For those of us who were raised as English speakers, especially those of us who are white male English speakers, this makes absolute sense and has real material advantages. However, the four-fifths of the globe that do not speak English will constantly bump up against the significant barriers perpetuated by our industry and make it difficult for any who are marginalized in the scholcomms ecosystem to be able to assert their voice and to be counted.

The dominant research evaluation culture in the interdependent complexes of publishing and academia exerts pressure on researchers and journal boards to publish in English because it carries greater cultural capital for the individuals and a greater utility to their institutions in the global rankings. Moving us ever closer to a monologic discourse, or the ‘myth of the given’, we see that the symbolic capital of English content carries a greater legitimacy and has become the basic requirement for inclusion in the system.

After my talk in Munin, highlighting the huge growth of scholarly publishing in Indonesia (which we will assess further in a later article), a publisher friend said, “There’s so much of it. But it’s all in Indonesian, I can’t even read it.” To which, a Finnish friend commented, “The sad thing is that the people in Indonesia are probably having the same conversation we’ve had in Finland for years: what is the point of publishing in Finnish?” A conversation I suspect is happening worldwide in more than 200 languages that are not English.

These difficulties are not only faced by speakers of smaller languages like the five million Finns, but also by the 560 million who speak Spanish, the 312 million French speakers, and the 1.1 billion who speak Mandarin. As COPE points out, this gives some researchers innate advantages over others and the impression that scholarship in English is intrinsically of greater merit.

However, the pressures and direction of travel within the industry lead us to a monolingual and increasingly monocultural ecosystem that reflects the industry’s dominant perspectives and its historical and socio-economic situation in the Global North. This reduction in diversity leads to a growing number of data gaps due, in part, to a tyranny of metrics where scholarly journals pursue citation counts, further inculcating the research priorities and perspectives of the industry in the literature, and increasingly marginalizing local research.

The benefits of linguistic diversity are numerous and sometimes obvious. Many were highlighted in UNESCO’s recommendations on open science, which also takes into account gender approaches and the specific challenges of scientists, “…in different countries and in particular in developing countries, and contributes to reducing the digital, technological and knowledge divides existing between and within countries.” To promote broader engagement with research and vastly increase the chances that it will reach local and national policymakers, society, and its stakeholders.

Person sitting on a wooden bench looking out at a snowy landscape
Trømso photo by Daniel Vogel on Unsplash

Bibliodiversity seeks to encourage a polyphony in the literature, the fostering of the simultaneous presence of diverse voices and perspectives with their intertwined or conflicting points of view. This diversity of academic content is crucial to pursuing a pluralistic, rich, and unbiased scientific communication ecosystem. It is only when the industry supports a healthy ecosystem that is rich in diversity and enables marginalized voices like women (half the world) and non-English speakers (80% of the world) to access and participate equally in the publishing ecosystem that we can begin to bridge the data gaps that will see change begin to happen.

So, why have governments and policymakers come to care so much more about bibliodiversity in scholarly publishing and why are they beginning to take increasingly strong action on this? A well-known recent example was the outbreak of COVID-19 when the novel coronavirus was identified in patients in China. Scientists were sent to Wuhan to characterize what was happening in the first 425 cases, and, pursuing strong incentives within the academic system, they wrote up the paper in English in the New England Journal of Medicine, because you would, wouldn’t you?

The authorities were deeply concerned to find that frontline workers struggled to both access and interpret the findings. China’s policymakers responded by mandating that at least a third of nationally-funded research needs to be published in Chinese because content needs to be accessible and available in the national language to practitioners.

Language was also a critical difficulty faced by humanitarian workers responding to the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa, where vital information was only made available in English or French. UNICEF found that providing material only in English or French led to important knowledge gaps for the practitioners, frontline workers, and the general population for managing potential infection where only 20% of the population speak either language.

It is therefore obvious that language is critical in these pressured conditions. As was the data gap in the lack of contextual research for preventing and treating Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia were just as critical. Access is rarely a binary issue, it is pluralistic. And so bibliodiversity calls for broader systemic change not ‘just open access’ or ‘just bilingual’, it calls for how knowledge creation is enabled, valued, and accessible.

Data gaps, the lack of access to knowledge, and language barriers have life-and-death consequences in emergency conditions. It is the same in ‘normal times’. Removing language barriers to both access and the ability to create local, contextualized knowledge is critical to enabling communities, governments, and citizens to undertake actions and construct policies to the betterment of their own local and global society – the very reason we ‘do science’.

Simply, policies need to go beyond the ‘just sharing’ of open access and reflect the socio-economic need for bibliodiversity that supports open science to remove critical data gaps and improve the capacity for access to and participation in knowledge creation, for both emergencies such as emerging epidemics or for the long-term improvement of people’s health and quality of life – in short, why we do science in the first place.

Policymakers, governments, and regional bodies such as the European Commission and the Indonesian government are treating the need for more equitable and contextual access to science with increasing seriousness. We will examine those in more detail in the next post as we assess open science and attempt to identify real-world impact of open policies.

Mark Huskisson

Today’s post is by Mark Huskisson. Mark is the Publishing Development Specialist at the Public Knowledge Project and the co-chair of the Assembly of the Commons for the European Research Infrastructure, OPERAS.

Discussion

1 Thought on "Guest Post:  Reflections from The Munin Conference Part One – Bibliodiversity"

Given the rapid evolution of AI, it’s no longer a pipedream to imagine translation-on-demand, meaning translation at the point of consumption. The technical issue may be close to being solved. But then there are the rights issues . . . and the trust issues.

Leave a Comment