Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication: the case of Finnish scholarly publishers

The signatories of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication support the following recommendations to be adopted by policy-makers, leaders, universities, research institutions, research funders, libraries, and researchers:

1. Support dissemination of research results for the full benefit of the society.

• Make sure researchers are merited for disseminating research results beyond academia and for interacting with heritage, culture, and society.
• Make sure equal access to researched knowledge is provided in a variety of languages.

2. Protect national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research.

• Make sure not-for-profit journals and book publishers have both sufficient resources and the support needed to maintain high standards of quality control and research integrity.
• Make sure national journals and book publishers are safeguarded in their transition to open access.

3. Promote language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems.

• Make sure that in the process of expert-based evaluation, high quality research is valued regardless of the publishing language or publication channel.
• Make sure that when metrics-based systems are utilized, journal and book publications in all languages are adequately taken into account.

Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication has been prepared by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV), the Committee for Public Information (TJNK), the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, Universities Norway (UHR) and the COST Action "European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities" (ENRESSH).