Another Workflow Is Possible: Building Trust and Relinquishing Control for Multilingual Digital Publishing Futures

The Early Roots of Multilingual Journals in the 17th and 18th Centuries

While the histories of scholarly editing and book history have received significant treatment in scholarly communications research, the history of scholarly journals and the role that multilingualism played in them receive less attention. In the history of academic journals, 1665 was a banner year.³ The earliest known scholarly periodical, Le Journal des sçavans, began publication in France early that year under the editorship of Jean Denis de Sallo, a Parisian lawyer and writer. Interdisciplinary in nature, Le Journal des sçavans included notes on inventions in the sciences, news from the arts, court decisions, and scholarly book reviews. De Sallo’s approach to editing was strident, to say the least. Early content in the journal reflected a tendency towards searing critique and served as a vehicle for de Sallo’s political leanings. Because de Sallo supported the Gallican movement, which advocated for a new French church separate from the Roman Catholic Church, the journal was suspended during its first year of publication under pressure from the pope.⁴ The next year, it was revived under new editorial leadership and resumed publication until a brief hiatus from 1792 to 1816 for being on the wrong side of the French Revolution. Since 1816, the journal has continued to be published, now under the name of Le Journal des savants.

Unlike Le Journal des sçavans, other early scholarly journals were linked to scholarly societies: voluntary organizations of scholars—including, but not limited to or even dominated by, those employed in academic positions—formed to share knowledge on topics of mutual interest. Inspired by Le Journal des sçavans, the Royal Society of London immediately launched their own journal in 1665, with the goal of disseminating innovations in the sciences. Henry Oldenburg, a secretary of the Royal Society, held the first editorial position at the new journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Much of his time, however, was consumed by managing journal finances. As a result, he began sending articles submitted to the journal to fellows of the Royal Society for their expert review—the earliest known instance of peer review, albeit an informal system driven by Oldenburg’s personal networks.⁵

Between 1665 and 1790, nearly 500 serial scientific and technical journals are known to have been published in Europe by scholarly societies.⁶ Aileen Fyfe et al. note that participation in these societies—and publication in their journals—was the voluntary work of typically middle- and upper-class men.⁷ The early history of humanities journals during this time period is more difficult to grasp, given that lines between readers, scholars, and critics blurred in periodicals at the time.⁸ Neither scientific nor humanistic content of the 17th and 18th centuries resembles the genre of “journal article” that proliferates today in its various disciplinary incarnations, as conventions of scholarly communications are shaped by changes in discursive and linguistic communities over time.

Wildly influential, the model developed at the Royal Society was replicated by scholarly societies across Europe. The French, for example, began publishing L’Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences in 1666. The line between editor and author blurred in the early years of the journal, with the substantial work of assembling and writing each annual issue falling upon editor Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle.⁹ The German scientific journal Miscellanea Curiosa Medico-Physica appeared in 1670, published by the Collegium Naturae Curiosorum. While little has been documented about the history of this journal, early society presidents initially served as editors, largely providing instructions to authors on preparing manuscripts for submission. Beginning in 1683, a “Director Ephemeridium” (editorial director) was appointed. According to Frances Mason Barnett, the labor fell to a small group of society members who edited—and censored—submissions by “passing judgment on the quality and credibility of observations.”¹⁰ The academy of Copenhagen put out Acta Medica et Philosophica Hafniensia in 1673, first edited by Thomas Bartholin, but little is known of his editorial praxis.¹¹

Multilingualism was part of the very foundations of journal editing. This initially took the form of including translations of work previously published in other venues. After all, the purpose of these scholarly journals, which were linked to the Republic of Letters of the 17th and 18th centuries, was to share research, but they were primarily published in vernacular languages that delimited readership. Translating original publications into other languages was crucial to scholarly communications across linguistic boundaries. In fact, in the first issue of Philosophical Transactions—the second oldest academic journal—Oldenburg included an English translation of a book review that had originally appeared in French in the first issue of Le Journal des sçavans just months earlier. Other translations from Latin, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, Persian, and Russian variously appeared in Philosophical Transactions, demonstrating an editorial inclination towards facilitating exchange of ideas regardless of linguistic barriers.

But multilingualism came to include publishing in multiple languages as well. In addition to English-language publication, Philosophical Transactions also published articles in Latin, the lingua franca in the sciences of the time.¹² This decision reflected the role of Latin in mediating linguistic divides in Europe at the time as well as a desire for scholarly communication across language barriers. But Oldenburg’s multilingual ambitions were broader: entire texts appeared in languages other than English and Latin, notably French, Italian, and German.¹³ Committed to cross-linguistic scholarly communications more broadly, Oldenburg intended to translate Philosophical Transactions into Latin himself. By 1671, however, John Sterpin in Germany and Christoph Sand in the Netherlands had beaten Oldenburg to the punch with their own translations. Later, Philosophical Transactions was translated into French in the 18th century by L’Acadèmie royale des sciences.¹⁴

The 19th-Century Multilingual Journal Boom

The first professional academic organizations—a departure from the voluntary scholarly societies of the past—began forming in the 19th century in fields, ushering in a proliferation of new journals. Multilingualism remained part of this expansion. Germany, in particular, experienced a boom in the development of professional academic organizations that would later spread around the world, due in large part to the model of higher education envisioned by Wilhelm von Humboldt—a blend of research and teaching ultimately unfettered by the state—that influenced the establishment of German research universities.¹⁵ In Germany, notably the University of Berlin, which was founded in 1810, research gained a firm footing within universities. Later, in 1876, Johns Hopkins established his eponymous US university in Baltimore, Maryland, emulating the German model envisioned by Humboldt. Johns Hopkins University significantly influenced higher education institutions in the United States as many universities adopted its educational frameworks.¹⁶ The same model was exported across the globe as the United States invested in universities in newly independent countries in Africa beginning in the mid-20th century, to consolidate its influence in the former colonies. Within the Humboldtian model of higher education, scholarly journals only continued to become more central to scholarly life in universities as currency for their prestige economies.

With research quickly becoming the province of universities, disciplinarity became king. New journals first began differentiating between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities before becoming increasingly more disciplinary by the end of the century. Historians, philologists, biologists, and psychologists coalesced for advocacy and for control over curricula. At the same time, publication was beginning to be viewed as an egalitarian and meritocratic measure of scholarly standing that could replace social status as a metric of renown.¹⁷ Newly emerging professional organizations had answers to these problems and more.

The formation of these professional organizations typically followed two patterns: organizational models were adopted in a new national context or implemented in new disciplines. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818. The model was replicated in Ireland in 1835, Switzerland in 1837, and the Netherlands in 1847. In the case of cross-disciplinary formation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1848, while the American Social Science Organization followed suit in 1865. The Modern Language Association was founded in 1883, while the American Historical Association was established in 1884, and the American Economic Association formed in 1885. Towards the end of the century, professional organizations had emerged in more than 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.¹⁸ These organizations created opportunities for advocacy, community, conversation, and the articulation of often-contested and hotly debated disciplinary standards. One of the mechanisms through which they realized these goals was the creation of academic journals. As a result, the 19th century saw an explosion of new scholarly journals. Scientific periodicals worldwide, which are well documented, grew from approximately 100 to 10,000.¹⁹

Although the missions of professional organizations and their journals began aligning with those we see in these and similar organizations today, the role of editor varied widely. In medical journals of the 19th century in Europe and the United States, editors often wrote the bulk of the content that appeared in issues.²⁰ Solo editors or editorial teams that did not rely on the assistance of peer review were not uncommon, as in the case of Edinburgh’s journals of the century, notably the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, Edinburgh Journal of Science, and Edinburgh Journal of Natural and Geographical Science.²¹ In many cases, editors relied on their own networks for submissions and book reviews.²² Publications from the Royal Society continued to rely on their distributed model first implemented by Oldenburg in Philosophical Transactions, though reviews had by that point begun passing through a Committee of Papers that determined whether an article would be published.²³ Meanwhile, organizations such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences began establishing editorial boards for their publications and relied on collaborations with librarians, moving away from editorial control resting in the hands of a single individual.²⁴

Unlike trends in scholarly communications today, multilingualism was a regular fixture of 19th-century academic journals. In some, this took the form of publishing translations. Scottish journals routinely included translations of articles previously published in French.²⁵ Multilingual approaches to editing also facilitated intellectual exchange in countries that were more peripheral to dominant European academic communities of the time, though this was often monodirectional. Portuguese journals such as O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra published translations of mathematical texts from Latin and also published articles in Latin and French. Similarly, Hungarian periodicals of the 19th century began publishing translations of scholarship from English, French, and German and only later published original scholarship by Hungarian scholars. Chinese journals of the 19th century also relied on publishing translations of scholarship from Europe, some translated by European missionaries and scholars, others by Chinese scholars.²⁶ But publishing articles in multiple languages within a single issue continued as well. For example, journals of the Royal Swedish Society, while mostly published in Swedish, also included papers in German, French, and English.²⁷ The outlier, unsurprisingly, is the United States, where English-only publications reigned.

These developments in multilingual publishing are inextricable from the colonial power dynamics of the 19th century. English was slowly establishing itself as a dominant language through the British Empire’s global exploits.²⁸ We might view the attention to multilingualism as a reaction to encroaching English-language hegemony. In one regard, it offered a way of maintaining access to knowledge for communities that were not predominantly English speakers. But publishing in languages other than English was also a way of asserting cultural power and, indeed, national scholarly identities.

The predominant labor model behind translation was largely voluntary, as in the case of the British journal Scientific Memoirs, for which editor Richard Taylor used a practice akin to crowdsourcing: soliciting and managing a robust roster of volunteers aimed at making scholarship from other European countries available to English readers.²⁹ Of course, much of editorial and authorial labor was voluntary, as remains typical today. The 19th century would turn out to be the last great age of multilingualism in academic journals, which featured an openness to publishing in multiple languages and deep interest in cultural transmission through translation that offered some resistance to linguistic hegemony.

The Decline of Multilingual Journals in the 20th and 21st Centuries

All of this radically shifted in the 20th century. While much of the first half of the century was occupied by wars and pandemics, higher education would find itself transformed in the post–World War II era. Editorial practices in journals and the role of multilingualism changed too. With exponential growth in the number of journals, multilingual journals were outnumbered by those in English and did not grow apace. In the United States, the expansion of higher education after World War II led to larger communities of academics, further growth of professional organizations, and hyperdisciplinarity. Expansion was not just limited to the United States but was, in fact, a worldwide expansion. Factors include the role of universities in postwar rebuilding in Europe, the founding of new higher education institutions in newly independent countries that had formerly been colonies, and the pressures of scientization associated with the Cold War.³⁰

Such substantial growth had a tremendous impact on the landscape of scholarly journals. Often-cited statistics for journal growth estimated by A. J. Meadows are staggering. Meadows claims that 10,000 journals worldwide in 1951 had become 71,000 by 1987.³¹ With journal articles being the coin of the realm for academic careers, new journals proliferated. As hyperdisciplinarity increased, more and more specialized journals began appearing. Fyfe et al. note that the scholarly communications landscape became increasingly commercialized in the postwar era, which from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s appeared to be a mutually beneficial relationship between academic institutions and commercial publishers. By the 21st century, however, this dynamic had become an imbalanced one that heavily favors commercial publishers’ interests and bottom lines.³² The later years of the 20th century also correspond with the increased neoliberalization of higher education, through frameworks such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom, ever-rising requirements of publications for tenure and/or promotion around the world, and the demand for measurable metrics for research output and impact. Journal articles have a central role in these demands.

What roles did editors assume during this time? On one hand, some editors responded to the changes in higher education that led to increased demand for metrics and hyperdisciplinarity to meet the needs of a shifting profession that was also growing more diverse. For example, Brett Fairbairn, who served as editor of the Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire in the early 1990s, described the role of journals and editors as “legitimizing and compartmentalizing knowledge” and “legitimizing and compartmentalizing academics.” Exactly what—or who—gets legitimized and deemed to fit within the parameters of a journal is, as Fairbairn acknowledges, arbitrary. In the context of the subjective nature of vetted and suitable scholarship, Fairbairn writes, “As long as we know who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ in our profession … the gatekeeper function has been performed, no matter whether the standards are entirely consistent or fair.” In Fairbairn’s perspective, these concerns can be mitigated by “a commitment to integrity and fairness on the part of all who participate in journals.” He goes on to say that fairness depends on journals being “diverse, pluralistic, and changing … A diverse and evolving constellation of journals.”³³ On the other hand, some editors positioned themselves as unrepentant gatekeepers. For example, in 2003, Philippe Contamine, then editor of Les Journal des savants, described his mission: “We try to be the guardians of civilization.”³⁴

In this environment, English firmly entrenched itself as a lingua franca for journals, aided by the drive of commercial publishers to expand their market share in an increasingly international audience.³⁵ According to Race MoChridhe, we can understand this as a “hidden paywall of English.”³⁶ Philippe Mongeon and Adèle Paul-Hus found that commercial databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, owned by commercial publishers Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, respectively, are dominated by English-language journals. Other scholars, such as John Mingers, Evangelia Lipitakis, Marcel Clermont, and Harald Dyckhoff, have demonstrated that Google Scholar primarily indexes journals published in English.³⁷ These decisions by database designers magnify biases towards the English language in journal readership and citation because English-language journals dominate the very databases that provide researchers with access to scholarship. As a result, publishing one’s scholarship in English-language journals creates reputational capital in the form of readership and citation metrics. Françoise Salager-Meyer explains that vernacular journals have small reading audiences that are rarely transnational and are generally limited to the authors who write for them. She found that scholars of the Global South tend not to publish in these journals because “they prefer to send their best works to mainstream journals written in English.”³⁸ Publishing in such journals, rather than local ones, also generates cultural capital, particularly in the Global South, where higher education institutions valorize scholarship published in English, in publication venues of the Global North.³⁹ At the same time, the English language also dominates the internet. Even though only 4.7% of the world’s population primarily speaks English, over 55% of websites are in English as of 2023.⁴⁰ The cumulative effects of these forces have marginalized non-English publications.

Within the broader, systemic dynamics that solidify English-language hegemony in the landscape of journal publishing, how do editors conceptualize their role in the 21st century? The genre of editorial reflections—editorial notes written by departing editors of journals—offers much insight on how 21st-century journal editors conceive of their roles. Scopus indexed more than 1,000 such pieces between 2000 and 2023, while Web of Science indexed over 3,000 during the same period. Using jsLDA for topic modeling, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) Python collocations module for bigrams and trigrams, and the scikit-learn Python library for term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), I examined these full-text editorial notes to identify common features within the genre and better understand how editors construct their identities and roles as editors.

Editorial reflections, often solipsistic in nature, contain predictable features: insights on growth of readership, submissions, and authorship; acknowledgment of the ways the journal has changed under the editor(s)’ leadership; and advice for future authors. Inherent in the language editors use to define their roles is a mindset that implies gatekeeping. Among the themes that recur in relation to how editors define their roles are safeguarding the scope of the journal, maintaining quality of the journal, and upholding the integrity of the journal and its peer review processes. Certainly, scope, quality, and integrity are central to the work of journal editors. After all, scholarly communities must be able to trust that they are accessing scholarship that is relevant to them, externally vetted, and reflective of scholarly ethics. But despite the assertions in editorial reflections that these are the domain of the editor, they are more realistically made possible by the ecosystem of participants that has evolved through the history of scholarly journals since the 17th century: not only the editor but also managing editors, editorial boards, peer reviewers, copy editors, publishers, and more.

What journal editing has lost since its illustrious past, however, is a place for multilingualism. The rare occurrences in which editors address multilingualism are in journals that are designed to be bilingual (e.g., in countries such as Canada that have multiple national languages) or journals that are explicitly producing knowledge on translation or, more frequently, teaching English to learners of other languages. In the realm of online journals, grasping for editorial control results from multiple factors. Online journals themselves have had their legitimacy questioned—as if “online” is somehow synonymous with a lack of peer review or quality control. This reflects the intersections of capitalism and knowledge production, where prestige and legitimacy accrue behind paywalls, a reflection of the market forces that suggest merit stems from commodification of knowledge and that openly available scholarship must be suspect. The rise of predatory journals exacerbates this tension between open access and commodification. It produces an entrenched mentality: quality must be overly controlled and gatekeeping must be maintained to surmount the concern over a lack of legitimacy. Into this breach steps the editor: the person—indeed, it is often a lone person—who understands themself responsible for the journal contents. In this world of scholarly periodicals, multilingualism suffers.

A New Path Forward to Recovering Multilingual Futures

How can we learn from the past and engage the affordances of electronic publishing to reclaim a place for multilingualism within academic journals? It begins by recognizing that the role of editor, particularly as it has evolved over four centuries in the Global North, has become synonymous with control over content and a responsibility to guarantee that scholarship meets an acceptable, if amorphous, standard for publication. We must reorient our notion of the editor and the work of editing away from the individual or small team that functions as gatekeepers and towards greater trust in the ecosystem that makes scholarly journals possible—trust that Oldenburg recognized was possible as early as 1665. Based on recent editing experiences, I offer the following advice for making this reorientation possible so we can move towards multilingual futures.