Publish (in English) or Perish: Greek Academia and the Imposition of English Language

Meritocracy and the Fetishization of Bibliometrics in Greek Higher Education

Bibliometrics are often considered an objective indicator leading towards meritocracy and have elevated into scientometrics; bibliometrics are used in many fields as a (sole) proof of scholarship and excellence. However, its universal application does not lead towards meritocracy but towards the reproduction of inequality. This inequality is not only based on a sort of center-periphery dualism with all of its class inequality connotations, but it also is based on the structural differences between knowledge production and publishing in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and in humanities and social sciences. Of course, issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation should additionally be taken into consideration (Blair-Loy and Cech 2022, 5–6).

Not all scholars have access to the same resources which are needed when one wants to publish in Q1 journals.¹ The language barrier and thus financial resources to cover translations, copyediting, proofreading, and/or other publication costs, such as the so-called article processing charges (APCs) (Hochberg 2019, 104–13, 120, 164–71), are sometimes impossible to overcome outside elite universities and educational systems of wealthier states that provide additional publishing grants to their academic staff or pay wages that allow them to do so (Chandrasekhar 2014, 127). In Greece, an assistant professor on tenure receives about €1,200 per month and teaches at least six hours (often eight or nine) per week on an undergraduate level and often additional hours on a master’s level. The assistant professor also has to be on the university premises for administrative or other work for another 12 hours each week (Euridyce 2023). Nevertheless, current academic literature focuses more on the cost of academic publishing for publishers (Van Noorden 2013; Grossmann and Brembs 2021) than on the costs with which academics as content producers are often burdened (Hochberg 2019, 120). Costs are far higher for non-native-English-language scholars and include both direct costs of learning a foreign language as well as opportunity costs or translation and copyediting costs (Lukács 2007; Léger 2023, 94; Van Parijs 2011, 73–82).

Precarity is the norm for researchers and academics in Greece (Precademics 85.42.1, n.d.). Thus, they strive to acquire or hold on to a position or grant and strictly follow the government’s directives and those of higher education and research institutions in order to have a chance of employment or of receiving funding. Publishing in journals selected for their prestige and metrics is a global trend in the case of untenured scholars (Niles et al. 2020) since these journals are valued more when decisions on tenure or funding are made than achieving a wider readership for one’s work. In this part of the article, the qualitative and quantitative criteria which an academic candidate for tenure needs to fulfill will be presented and critically assessed, as well as the criteria and quality indicators the Greek state uses when deciding on the funding for higher education institutions.

In 2022, the Law 4957/2022, “New Horizons in Higher Education Institutions: Strengthening the Quality, Functionality and Connection of HEIs with Society and Other Provisions,” was published, which constitutes the framework for higher education institutions (Eurydice 2022). Article 143 concerns the “Requirements for the Election and Promotion of Members of the Teaching and Research Staff.” Paragraph 6 refers to qualifications as well as to peer-reviewed publications published in Greece or abroad. However, the very next sentence states, “[p]articularly where the position’s subject area relates to a scientific field for which there are international scientific journals, the authorship of articles published in international scientific journals will be taken into account, together with the extent of their impact.”² The next paragraph states four factors to be taken into account in order for a scholar to attain an academic job, especially a tenured one. The first factor is “the candidate’s international research and scientific presence, and in particular whether his/her overall research and scientific work is recognized by other researchers and establishes prospects for an international academic career.” One could argue that this is simply an issue of meritocracy. But as I have shown above, meritocracy is neither neutral nor unbiased.

One should bear in mind that for tenured positions in Greece, there are two preconditions: publishing and teaching or working as a researcher. The latter precondition requires a minimum of three years’ experience for an assistant professor or five years for an associate professor position. Needless to add how difficult it is to both teach every semester, often commuting on a weekly basis in order to teach, and conduct research in order to publish (in a language other than your own).

A year before enacting Law 4957/2022, in 2021, the Minister and Deputy Minister of Education and Religions of Greece issued the “Joint Ministerial Decision (JMD) 38124/Z1 (2021): Establishment of Criteria, Quality Indicators and Specifications for the Distribution of the Annual Funding of Higher Education Institutions.” According to the JMD, 20% of the allocated funds would be distributed according to “qualitative criteria,” among which is the “[q]uality of the research output in terms of publications and scientific impact.” As concerns the humanities and social sciences, the JMD specified that there are two criteria jointly assessed, the first of which is quantitative:

The proportion of papers published in the previous year in relation to the number of faculty members, at the level of the institution. Calculated by dividing the annual total of specific published papers of the Foundation’s faculty members (based on a list of publications to be provided by the Foundation) by the total number of faculty members of the Foundation. (Greece Ministry of Education and Religions 2021)

The ratio of high-impact publications by faculty members in the previous year to the total number of faculty members at the institution level. Such publications are understood as foreign language monographs in peer-reviewed series, foreign-language articles in peer-reviewed journals, editing of foreign-language edited volumes. Calculated by the ratio of high-impact publications of the Foundation’s faculty members (based on a list of publications to be submitted by the Foundation and checked by the HAHE [Hellenic Authority of Higher Education]) to the total number of the Foundation’s faculty members. (Greece Ministry of Education and Religions 2021)

From the above, one may conclude that, at least for Greece, what Reece McGee (1992) formulated as the “research publication criterion of merit” for the sake of teaching has not been reversed. On the contrary, the former has been reinforced while the latter is also a precondition. Precarious academics, but also academics in general, need to teach in Greek and publish in English; however, as I explained previously, finding the time and resources for research and publishing alongside teaching is often hard. If we would generalize from this, we can say that the pressure to publish in English instead of one’s native language in some cases intensifies, as when native-language journals are not indexed or have a low impact factor and by the pressure to provide metrics, such as citations for one’s work, as proof of the value of one’s research.

Once again, this is no Greek exception; there is a global trend that connects funding and promotions with publishing in high-impact factor journals and similar metrics (Jeater 2018, 9–12; Sáez and do Nascimento 2021). Identifying these quantitative criteria as qualitative ones undermines research not published in indexed journals (Jeater 2018, 10), as in research published in languages such as Greek. Limiting research results for language (: Greek) and subject areas (: Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences) in Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives approximately 400 and 2,600 journal articles, respectively. Simply browsing through Greece’s National Documentation Center’s (NDC) Social Sciences and Humanities Index results in more than 20,000 results for arts and humanities alone. The underrepresentation, especially in highly esteemed indexes such as Scopus, is more than obvious. Not being indexed is becoming equivalent to not being published, which is far from true since we witness a very rich publishing activity falling under the Scopus radar.

Such policies of metrics, intentionally or not, (re-)produce an elitist and Eurocentric perception of scholarly research and should be perceived as academic imperialism (Paasi 2015), which goes hand-in-hand with English linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992, 46–77). The same goes with the author-pays model for open access (OA). Wealthier institutions may cover such cost, while it is rather unlikely that Greek institutions do the same. Scholars themselves cannot pay from their already low wages. Thus, their research will be bound behind a paywall, while scholars from academic and economic centers will publish in high-impact, OA journals and thus have a greater chance of being cited (Burgman 2019). The imposition of universal academic standards does not lead to a democratization of academia but to the standardization of inequalities as it does not take into account the fact that not all scholars have the same available resources for research and publishing. We should bear in mind that this standardization is not necessarily imposed by external factors, such as the European Union (EU), although the EU is far from innocent as far as language inequality is concerned (Szul 2015). On the contrary, a feeling of inferiority and the need to catch up with the West is often internalized (Zeiny 2019, 91). This is a mere reproduction of the “East-West Mimesis” (Mufti 2016, 214–15) in which modernization or evolution is simply perceived as copying what the West does instead of critically assessing the global developments and adjusting them to suit national conditions best. How can universal meritocracy standards supposedly exist along with global inequalities, and how can they be applied in different national contexts from those that imposed this standardization—that is, the Anglophone academic world?

Metrics in and about Greece

Since the last decade there have been a number of studies examining Greek publication cultures through a scientometric lens in order to evaluate or rank them. While some have tried to use databases, alone or in combination with others, that include articles written in Greek, such as Google Scholar (Altanopoulou, Dontsidou, and Tselios 2012; Kazakis et al. 2014) or PubMed (Kyriakidou et al. 2018), the rest exclusively used English-biased databases (see Lazaridis 2010; Kazakis 2014, 2015; Kutlača et al. 2015). To be fair, the fallacy or bias in respect to the methodology used by Greek scientometrics is not a mere issue of academics or academic groups conducting research similar to the above. It is an issue of how metrics are perceived, developed, and presented by the Greek national organizations that produce and evaluate these metrics. It also depends on what the goal of these metrics is. Is it accuracy or is it an issue of providing some data in order to prove that, as academics, “we are doing our job”?

The paper by Alexandros Iliakis and Christina Anastasopoulou (2018) on a bibliometric analysis at the National Technical University of Athens, one of Greece’s more prominent institutions, leads to a puzzling acknowledgment. Their work was the outcome of an internal evaluation of the department in order to comply with the “standards of the Hellenic Quality Assurance and Certification Authority in Higher Education” (161). The authors admitted that the method to conduct this bibliometric analysis was not based on scientific grounds but simply on which databases they could afford to use. Scopus and Google Scholar were used, while other methods and databases were excluded, merely due to their cost, and the manual extraction of data from Scopus, where there was an active subscription, and Google Scholar was perceived by the authors as the only feasible option (163–64). The latter is far from being free of bias but is more inclusive regarding language (Jensenius et al. 2018). The bias within these databases becomes more than obvious when alternative metrics are used, especially for arts and humanities research (Togia, Koseoglou, and Zapounidou 2017, 148).

The NDC posts on its website that it is the “National Authority of the Hellenic Statistical System for European Statistics on Research, Development and Innovation.” The NDC provides bibliometrics for Greek publications in international scientific journals based solely on Scopus and primarily WoS. What is contradictory is that the NDC also provides a platform for OA academic journals called “ePublishing,” and it then produces and presents bibliometrics that in principle do not even include the publications it facilitates. This exclusion is more than evident if one cross-references the ePublishing list with the list produced by DOAJ in respect to indexed OA journals published in Greece. Christina Koulouri (2023) recently announced that the NDC, in response to the English-language bias affecting Greek higher education, is creating its own repository of Greek-language publications that will be like a “Greek Google Scholar.” But is this what is missing? One may argue that creating one’s own repository and index is not necessarily a bad thing if the problem is only in terms of visibility.

Cultural Entanglements of Choosing Global over Local

Regardless of the validity of this belief, classical Greece is considered to be the cradle of Western civilization (Duchesne 2011, 297n6). Thus, it is only reasonable for one to imagine that promoting research in and teaching of ancient Greek philosophy would at least be encouraged if not a priority. However, by promoting foreign publishing, the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs of Greece is unconsciously undermining such a task. This is evident if one browses through Elsevier’s service SciVal, which “provides access to the research performance of over 24,300 research institutions and their associated researchers, from 234 nations worldwide.” According to SciVal, “Kant” is the most prominent topic in the field of philosophy worldwide, while, as one could easily imagine, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates are the most prominent topics in Greece based on the academic articles published (see Table 1).

Based on the SciVal metrics and in combination with the JMD directives that focus on “high-impact publications”—which, as already explained, are framed as foreign-language publications—it is not unlikely that we may face a shift in research and publishing from topics of a national and local interest to those that trend globally. This will not be a result of a change in researchers’ interests, which is always welcomed, but imposed on them in order to increase their chances for “high-impact publications.” In other words, a shift from ancient Greek philosophy to Kantian philosophy—or abandoning researching and writing on and about Spinoza and Rousseau—may seem the rational thing for a Greek scholar of philosophy in order to increase possibilities of both being published in high-impact publications and being cited (by choosing the most trending research topics).

To be clear, this article does not argue for a solely ethnocentric approach to education and research but for an approach focused on specific societal needs, which is crucial for designing cultural policies to address these needs. In fact, ethnocentrism or even nationalism may develop in order to counter Anglophone academic imperialism (Phillipson 2009, 192). Instead, I argue for the free choice of research and educational topics without the specter of “high-impact publications”—and the respective Anglophone gaze—haunting these decisions. Thus, scholars may focus on local or international issues and choose a single local or a transnational or comparative aspect. The choice being made should be determined on their interests and questions or even on the scholarly or social problems of their times, local or global, and not by knowledge monopolies and academic imperialism. This will be a step towards a decolonization of knowledge (Kamel 2022, 27–30).

Koulouri is correct when she notes that Greece—and indeed every country in the world—should add to its cultural heritage (Koulouri 2023). It is evident that it will be more difficult to publish on topics of local history, specific topics that are of no global or at least regional interest in English-language publications aimed at broader audiences. Thus, a question raised is whether academic publishing seeks to produce knowledge and raise social awareness or is simply an individualistic, utilitarian project for researchers’ personal development and careers. Meritocracy is clearly the path to the latter, but what is the path to the former?

Decolonizing Knowledge Dissemination: Moving Away from Metrics and Towards Open Science

Current academic trends perceive metrics to be synonymous with merit. Thus, instead of scholarly publishing serving the needs of an author to share research results, it primarily serves to add numbers to the author’s metrics. Therefore, the publishing choices made for a specific medium (journal, monograph, or even an article in the popular press) and what language to reach a specific audience do not matter as much as finding a journal which will be more likely to be accredited based on its impact factor (PLoS Medicine Editors 2006).

Publishing in Greek, and, in general, in languages apart from English, will in most instances result not only in excluding one’s research from foreign publications but also in fewer citations (Gonzáles-Alcaide, Valderrama-Zurián, Aleixandre-Benavent 2012, 300–301; Al-Janabi 2022). Even if Greek researchers choose to publish in English, they ought to consider that unless they choose a journal specialized in Greece, such as the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, they may need to alter their topic or argument in order to give a more global or at least a comparative context to increase chances of acceptance. Writing in the lingua franca increases the potential to expand the academic audience, but what does an academic sacrifice for the sake of metrics? Broadening an argument or topic and making it more global, although not a negative thing per se, leads to a re-focus of research for the sake of publication and not for research interests or scientific questions.

Nevertheless, the argument is not that researchers should not publish in foreign languages nor that metrics should not count in job placements or promotions. The argument is that the imposition and prioritization of publishing in foreign languages rather than the native language may lead to the impoverishment of the exchange of national knowledge and thus scientific production as well as the decline of local journals (López-Navarro et al. 2015, 964). It may even exclude important research from being counted as such, due to the fact it may not be published in foreign journals that count. The language of publication should be a choice related to the nature of the research and its potential audience. It also leads to an increase in publishing articles in journals since half a dozen articles in indexed journals will count more than a monograph of six chapters, especially in a non-English language, since the latter will likely result in a lower number of citations (Altanopoulou, Dontsidou, and Tselios 2012, 113). Reshaping knowledge to be disseminated in different issues or even different journals, rather than in a coherent monograph, is an additional setback for both authors and readers caused by these policies (Di Bittetti and Ferreras 2017, 126).

In the past there had been attempts to create a database that would index Greek-language publications and metrics, especially in the fields of humanities and social sciences (Kyriaki-Manessi 2014, 457). However, only a reference index has been compiled (Tsoukala et al. 2014). The Social Sciences and Humanities Index (grissh.gr) is far from complete and does not include metrics.³ Koulouri, the rector of Panteion University, has already declared the goal of creating a “Greek Google Scholar” (Koulouri 2023). This is not solely a Greek idea; the Chinese authorities have already decided that Science Citation Index (SCI) will no longer be a determinant for recruiting faculty in Chinese academic institutions. Although one could argue that this is a step towards a meritocracy, the aim is for the central government of China to “establish a Chinese ‘scientific citation index’ system ‘with Chinese characteristics and international influence’ ” (Sharma 2020).

Is this the answer to meritocracy and metricsocracy? Would it not be better to transform Greek (and other foreign-language) journals, OA or not, into multilingual OA journals as a first step to them being indexed by DOAJ or similar indexes, thus reaching both Greek and international audiences? This could result in a shift in incentives for Greek-speaking scholars in choosing when, where, in what format, and in which language they want to publish: from basing their decision solely on what would serve their career best to which academic and social criteria would serve their science, society, and their potential audience best. The uncritical adoption of global criteria of “academic merit” reminds us of how colonial education was imposed on the native populations, teaching them not only the colonial language, for example, but how colonial values were superior (Said 1994, 42, 101). Isn’t the perception of English as (a) indisputed lingua franca and (b) non-ethnocentric or nationalist (Phillipson 2009, 134) an example of the colonial and, in fact, ethnocentric gaze of the Anglophones?

What Is to Be Done?

Greek-speaking scholars are forced to publish in indexed foreign-language journals in order to conform to Greek state criteria for employment, promotion, or funding. This fetishization of metrics should not be countered by Greek indexing since it will simply be reproduced in a national-language context. Ending the mimesis and full endorsement of the obsession with metrics will allow Greek scholars to reconnect with Greek academia—including their students, who are often unable to read or fully comprehend their teachers’ work, since less than 50% have an adequate reading knowledge of English (Dendrinos, Zouganelli, and Karavas 2013, 26–27). We should not concede that knowledge or the production of new knowledge, in terms of scholarly publishing, no longer matters in education and is only a means of individualistic, academic advancement.

Metrics are not the sole indicator of scholarly value. However, in terms of documenting the reach and impact of research and accumulating statistics on it, alternative metrics should be used instead of the English-biased index databases. This is because the former are more inclusive and representative of the actual reach and impact (Mounce 2013, 15–16) than the latter.

What should the direction for Greek scholarly publishing be? A single and simple answer is rather unlikely. Nevertheless, multilingual OA publishing (Kulczycki et al. 2020) could result in disseminating knowledge both nationally and internationally. There should be incentives for multilingual scholarly publishing, such as sponsoring translations—so as not to burden the authors—mentoring, and providing copyediting services rather than simply rejecting written work due to language barriers, and for facilitating OA journals. Multilingualism may have a two-fold result in knowledge sharing to both a local/national and an international audience (Balula and Leão 2019, 2021; Fiormonte 2021, 360–61). This would counter “the growing tendency towards Englishisation, which increasingly puts at risk the importance of other languages as equally valid agents of science and culture (and ultimately their very existence as living languages)” (Balula and Leão 2021, 96). Multilingualism, as it is drafted in the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (Helsinki Initiative 2019), will enhance knowledge dissemination throughout society and not just at a scholarly level and protect “publishing locally relevant research.” Creating new or transforming existing journals into multilingual OA ones is and should not be a national task but a global demand in order to counter Anglophone imperialism. This decolonization process could be instigated by putting pressure on the Anglophone communities to undertake the task or cost of translating and disseminating non-Anglophone works, especially those coming from linguistic and academic communities that are underrepresented due to economic barriers (Fiormonte 2021, 360–61).

Another key issue relates to reshaping the current legislation so that foreign publications are not prioritized, which is a step the Greek state and academic institutions should take. This will ensure that scholarly publishing is not defined by its exchange value but rather by its use value. Scholars will be freer to choose where and in which language they publish based on which audience they expect will receive their work better.