Promoting balanced multilingualism in open science and scholarly communication

Multilingualism is increasingly recognised as a cornerstone of inclusive, pluralistic, and sustainable societies, as well as of open and equitable scholarly communication. International frameworks such as UNESCO’s 2003 Recommendation on Multilingualism and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, alongside initiatives like the 2019 Helsinki Initiative, have underscored its role in ensuring research impact, preserving local knowledge, and fostering trust between science and society. Building on this momentum, a wide range of projects across Europe and beyond—such as DIAMAS, CoARA, GoTriple, and OPERAS’ own initiatives—are addressing language biases in research assessment, promoting multilingual metadata and discovery platforms, and developing technology-aided translation and collaborative tools.

OPERAS advances the idea of “balanced multilingualism” in this policy brief, which seeks to challenge the hegemony of English without dismissing the value of a shared language. By supporting national publishing infrastructures, multilingual discovery platforms, collaborative translation services, and bibliodiverse publishing ecosystems, OPERAS aims to strengthen linguistic equity in scholarly communication. Its recommendations focus on recognising translation as scholarly output, investing in multilingual infrastructures and language technologies, and reforming research assessment to value all languages equally. Taken together, these efforts highlight the need to turn today’s “multilingual momentum” into sustainable practices that promote bibliodiversity, inclusivity, and responsible global knowledge exchange.