Multilingualism
The SIG works on: multilingualism in scholarly communication, translation, multilingual discovery tools and the endowment of national languages.
Scholarly publication is indisputably boosted by the use of the English language. However, the need to publish in English in order to get visibility and recognition represents an impoverishment of certain research fields, particularly in Social Sciences and Humanities. Taking this backdrop as a reference, the Special Interest Group for Multilingualism aims to support researchers and institutions who want to continue publishing in their own language and to develop transnational scientific cooperation at the same time. It also seeks to make contributions that will help encourage policies that reward the use of local languages as fully scientific languages.
Objective of the SIG
The SIG is involved in maintaining and enhancing the GoTriple platform, which is the European hub for Social Sciences and Humanities, and is developing a multilingual discovery tool. This SIG is also collaborating with the OPERAS-Plus project (September 2022 to July 2025) in order to develop a design of the components architecture to support the future OPERAS Translation Service (Deliverable D5.5 — https://zenodo.org/records/8289219). The SIG will further collaborate in the development and testing of the pilot of the Translation Service.
Multilingualism SIG will also contribute to CoARA WG on Multilingualism and Languages Biases in Research Assessment, and especially TF3 on Policy Advice and Implementation, in which OPERAS is one of the partners leading activities on devising and testing tools, guidelines and models to help institutions, researchers and evaluators in addressing language biases in assessment and supporting language skills of non-fluent speakers in concrete situations.
A brief history
OPERAS Special Interest Groups (SIG) were launched at the First OPERAS Workshop, held on 26/27 June 2017 in Amsterdam, under the name of “Working Groups”. They first presented their work at the OPERAS Conference “Open Scholarly Communication in Europe. Addressing the Coordination Challenge”, which took place from 31 May – 1 June 2018 in Athens. Each group published a white paper in July 2018. With the creation of OPERAS legal entity in March 2020, the working groups are relaunched as “Special Interest Groups”.
Publications
Check the Multilingualism SIG bookshelf to see the publications, events and presentations.
Contact Point
Delfim Leão (leo@fl.uc.pt) – Coimbra University, Portugal
Janne Pölönnen (janne.polonen@tsv.fi) – Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV), Finland
Special Interest Group Members
Delfim Leão – Coimbra University, Coordinator Multilingualism SIG
Delfim Leão is currently Vice-Rector for Culture, Communication and Open Science at Coimbra University. He is teacher and researcher at the Centre for Classical and Humanistic Studies at the University of Coimbra. His main areas of scientific interest are ancient history, law and political theory of the Greeks,
Janne Pölönnen – Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV), Coordinator Multilingualism SIG
Janne Pölönen is Secretary General for Publication Forum at Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, co-founder of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, and coordinator of CoARA WG on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment. Lic.Phil. in history, specialising in ancient Roman law and society research, his recent work is in the fields of scholarly communication, bibliometrics, research assessment, open science and learned societies.
Ana Balula – Aveiro University
Antonia Pedroso – ISCTE-IUL – University Institute of Lisbon
Cornelia Plag – Coimbra University
Cornelia Plag is associate professor at University of Coimbra. She has a PhD in Translation Studies and her main research areas are Translation – translator training and tools – and Linguistics.
Dulip Withanage – Public Knowledge Project
Elena Šimukovič – OPERAS SAC
Gimena del Rio Riande – CONICET – Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual (Argentina)
Gimena del Rio Rainde is an Associate Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET. Buenos Aires, Argentina) and a Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad del Salvador. MA and PhD in Romance Philology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), her main academic interests deal with Digital Scholarly Editing, Digital Humanities, and Open Research Practices in the Humanities. She serves as Ambassador of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in Latin America, coordinates the Laboratorio de Humanidades Digitales (HD LAB, CONICET), and edits the first Hispanic Digital Humanities journal, the Revista de Humanidades Digitales (RHD). She also serves as president at Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
Hanna Pięta – Nova FCSH
Isabel Gouveia – Coimbra University
Jean-François Nominé – CNRS
Jean-François Nominé is a translator at the CNRS in its Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (Inist). In addition to various interests in Open Access and Open Science in working groups and the Knowledge Exchange partnership (https://www.knowledge-exchange.info), he has recently focused his interest on human control of MTed translation and technological adaptation on both sides (machine and human). He provides translation services to scientific communities (research managers and teams, publicly funded publishers).
João Caetano – APEES – Portuguese Association of Higher Education Presses
Karla Avanço – OPERAS Coordination Team / OpenEdition
Karla Avanço is the community manager of OPERAS. With a PhD in linguistics, she reoriented to natural language processing and currently works with the diffusion and adoption of FAIR principles. She has experience in linguistics, scientific translation, and academic publication. She is based at OpenEdition in Marseille, France.
Lorena Caliman – Coimbra University
Lorena Caliman has a Master’s degree in Contemporary Communication and Culture (Federal University of Bahia), is a journalist and researcher in the field of public communication, disinformation and journalism. She is currently working in topics related to open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities, as a member of the University of Coimbra in projects related to the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. Lorena is currently a PhD student in Communication Sciences (University of Coimbra).
Markus Bang – ERIH PLUS
Mathieu Pigeon – Érudit
Nelson Ferreira – Coimbra University
Nelson H. S. Ferreira is researcher at University of Coimbra and has been studying and publishing within the scope of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean regions’ popular culture, literatures, languages and social history and ancient thought. Recently his research has been dedicated to the anthropological impact of the economic dependence of agricultural production in Sumerian and Roman cultures, to the history of science, to Knowledge management and to Knowledge Transfer from academy to society. He has a PhD in ‘Classical Studies’ (University of Coimbra) and in ‘Linguistic, literary and Cultural studies’ (University of Barcelona).
Simon van Bellen – Érudit
Simon van Bellen is senior research advisor at Érudit, the Canadian publishing platform in SSH disseminating around 300 scientific journals, after having completed a PhD in environmental sciences (UQAM, 2011). He aims to explore various aspects of scholarly communication, especially patterns in the use of scientific journals, the development of open access and the evaluation of impact of research and publication, and more precisely, the role and impact of French-language journals in Canada, for authors and for those downloading the content on the Érudit platform.
Susanna Fiorini – OPERAS
Susanna FIORINI is a translator and consultant in translation technology for research and international organisations. Since 2020, she has been coordinating the Translations and Open Science project, funded by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the French Ministry of Culture, with the aim to explore the possibilities offered by translation technologies to foster multilingualism in scholarly communication.
Toby Steiner – Thoth Open Metadata
Toby Steiner is Product Manager and COO at Thoth Open Metadata. With a background in Cultural and Media Studies (MA in Television Studies from Birkbeck, University of London), Toby has been involved in a variety of projects in the wider field of Open Scholarship, including working in Open Education and, more recently, in Open Access, with a particular focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to his involvement with Thoth, Toby has been Project Manager of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (2019-23).
Vanessa Proudman – SPARC Europe
Vanessa Proudman is Director of SPARC Europe, where she is working to make Open the default in Europe. Vanessa has 20 years of international experience working on Open Access, Open Science, Open Culture and Open Education with many leading universities and libraries worldwide from over 20 countries. She is working to increase and strengthen international, national and regional OS and Open Education policy-making and practice in Europe. Research and knowledge exchange are her vehicles to inform, connect and advocate for change in these areas. Prior to SPARC Europe, she worked at Tilburg University on various national and international projects, was programme manager at Europeana and led a dept on information and IT at a UN-European region research institute in Vienna for over 10 years.