Response to BOAI steering committee concerning multilingualism in Gold OA publishing environment

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the BOAI2020 steering committee asked for input from colleagues in all academic fields and regions of the world, to support the work on a new set of recommendations. We contribute from the perspective of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (www.helsinki-inititiave.org) by addressing the proposed question 3: "Do some strategies (methods, models) to advance OA have harmful longer-term consequences? If some strategies do cause harm, which strategies and which harms? Which strategies to advance OA positively foster (or at least avoid conflicts with) longer-term goals?"

Our main concerns are twofold: 

1. Funding model based on article processing charges (APC), which has emerged as the dominant funding model of international - and especially commercial - English language Gold OA publishing, jeopardizes not only diversity, equity and inclusion but also quality of academic work. 

2. Non-profit scholar-led publishers of journals and books in the various local and national languages across the world rely mainly on voluntary work of committed researchers and lack sufficient resources they need to maintain high standards of scholarly publishing and for sustainable open access transition. Therefore the Diamond OA model needs a sustainable funding mechanism.