Open access for the non-English-speaking world: overcoming the language barrier

English has become the dominant language in the global scientific community [1‐3]. With English as our medium of international communication, as long as we master it, we have access to 90% of the recently published articles indexed in MEDLINE [4]. An article written in English is far more likely to be cited and has a higher impact [5‐9].

Since the beginning of the MEDLINE database in 1966, the annual number and percentage of non-English journal articles indexed in it has continually decreased, from 81227 (47%) published in 1966 to 49083 (10%) in 2000 [4]. This trend applies to all non-English languages [10]. Scientists from non-English-speaking countries are under increasing pressure to publish their research outputs in English-language journals [4, 8] and non-English-language journals are switching to English in order to compete internationally [3, 9, 11]. This is a question of efficiency: how does the scientific community maximize our returns given limited resources at our disposal?

However, as science is increasingly published in English, non-English speakers suffer a genuine disadvantage. Suggestions have been made to help non-native-English-speaking authors publish in English-language journals, including hiring native-English-speaking specialized scientific writers [12] or pairing up with 'mentors' from affluent countries with much experience in scientific publishing [13]. But this is not enough. Not only should we help our colleagues in low income countries to publish in international journals so that they can play a more active role in the global scientific community and in international policy-making, we need to empower the lay people in these countries by facilitating scientific communication to them.

Despite the laudable effort of the Open Access Movement to make publicly funded scientific research freely available to all [14], research funded by non-Anglophone governments and public funds, of which the high-quality outputs are very likely to be published in English, become less accessible to their people due to language barriers. Research participants in developing countries, who supply the raw information on which many publications are based, often will not be able to read English. Even today, many doctors in rural China are not fluent in English. How can one "make the results of a clinical trial of a new drug accessible and understandable both to doctors who might prescribe it and to people who might start taking it"[14], if they cannot read English in the first place? The dilemma of publishing in English for the global scientific research community versus the vernacular for the local readers, researchers and lay people alike, is a genuine problem even in an Open Access context. Although it is argued that language barrier is not the biggest problem in scientific communication but information overload [15], it is nevertheless a big problem [16]. How should we address the issue of language inequity in scientific publishing and thus the dissemination of scientific knowledge across the world [17]?

It has been suggested that translation can be encouraged by limiting the restrictive copyright statements in journals to the original language [16]. In the case of Open Access journals like the Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License [18] and the copyright is retained by the author. As long as the original work is properly cited, the door to translation of journal articles into alternative languages is open wide.

Perhaps the first step is to translate abstracts into multiple languages. Latin American journal articles indexed in Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) [19] have English abstracts in addition to their Spanish or Portuguese originals. Most Chinese language journals today require authors of original research articles to submit an English abstract. Non-English-language journals have English abstracts available to make their articles more accessible to the international scientific community, and hopefully to boost their citation rates and impact factors. But why are there so few English language journals doing it the other way round and making their articles more accessible to the non-English-speaking world?

Perhaps there are two major reasons. Editors and publishers may think that there is no demand for this, as most readers of learned journals are intellectuals who, very likely, can read English. Why then should we make a great effort for such a tiny return?

My answer is, if we believe that the lay public have a right to access the outputs of publicly funded scientific research which aims to eventually improve their quality of life [20], this applies not only to the English-speaking world, but everyone on earth. From Shanghai to São Paulo, from Hanoi to Harare, medical research of public health importance is being conducted. Scientists, medical professionals, non-governmental organization workers, and lay participants alike, should have open access to biomedical information without the language barrier. There is an ethical imperative to disseminate scientific knowledge in multiple languages, and thus mitigate the ills of the North-South inequity [16, 17].

Furthermore, from the point of view of an Open Access journal, the availability of abstracts in alternative languages may increase the hit rate and download rate of its articles. By providing abstracts in alternative languages, potential readers will be able to locate relevant information through search engines using keywords in their own languages. They will then be linked to websites of Open Access journals. After reading the abstracts in their own language, interested readers can decide whether it is worth their efforts to read the whole paper in English, or seek help from teachers or translators.

However, one may wonder, even if we are persuaded to make our research outputs more accessible to the non-English-speaking peoples, how can we solve the second problem, the pragmatic one, namely the lack of resources, funding, manpower and editorial language expertise to do so? Editors may be monolingual. To hire professional translators is costly. To have abstracts available in languages of non-Roman scripts may be technically complicated. And in what languages should the abstracts be made available?

There are at least four options ahead for English-language journals to consider:

Although we are now living in a global village where distance "shrinks" as the internet network grows, we are far from a utopia where everyone can have access to scientific literature without barriers, including the language barrier. Many scientists from the non-English-speaking world still struggle to write and publish papers in English [4, 17]. Many lay people cannot read English properly [16]. The responsibility rests with us scientists and journal editors working in the English-speaking world, given the vast resources we have at hand compared to our counterparts in the developing world, to facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge between North and South and between the Anglophone peoples and the non-Anglophone peoples [17]. My vision of the future is that we can move beyond the first wave of the Open Access Movement towards its second wave: Multi-lingual Open Access publishing. Journals like Revista de Saude Publica have already adopted a bilingual online Open Access model [28]. As a Chinese proverb says, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with your first step". Therefore, the editorial board of Emerging Themes in Epidemiology announces that with immediate effect, our journal welcomes authors who are fluent in languages other than English to provide translations of the abstracts or full text of their articles as Additional files, submitted in PDF format. As an example, the abstract of this editorial has been translated into different languages (see Appendix). Let this be our first step to overcome the language barrier.

The abstract of this editorial has been translated into the following languages by the following translators (names in brackets):

The author receives no funding for this editorial.