How balanced is multilingualism in scholarly journals? A global analysis using the DOAJ database

The concept of balanced multilingualism (Sivertsen, 2018) aims at establishing “instruments for documenting and measuring the use of language for all the different purposes in research, thereby providing the basis for the monitoring of further globalization of research in a more responsible direction” (p. 2). One of the goals of the global scientific publishing industry should be to find solutions based on balanced multilingualism and supported by digital infrastructures in which “the need for communicating in a lingua franca does not necessarily imply the adoption of a lingua unica” (Balula and Leão, 2019:8). However, an analysis of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the largest database of fully open access journals produced in 130 countries, does not show any balanced multilingualism in the global landscape. DOAJ promotes linguistic diversity by indexing journals in 80 languages, including dialectal variations, indigenous languages, and languages spoken by less than 50,000 speakers (e.g., Aragonese). This paper will present the main trends in the languages in which journals publish their full-text contributions to respond to this unbalanced landscape. We conducted a descriptive analysis of the 17,564 journals listed in DOAJ in April 2022. Our findings show that 65% (11,331) of the journals listed publish only in one language, and 35% publish in two, three, and up to 16 languages. Our research shows that 50% of the multilingual journals are based in Asia and Latin America. In the presentation, we discuss some of the editorial policies implemented by multilingual journals.