Bringing linguistic diversity to PREreview: Spanish, Portuguese and beyond / Llevando la diversidad lingüística a PREreview: español, portugués y más allá / Trazendo a diversidade linguística para a PREreview: espanhol, português e além
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: As a consequence of British colonialism and the strengthening of U.S. global influence in the second half of the 20th century, English is the de facto language of scholarship. Non-native English speakers who are active in scholarly research face immeasurable barriers to participation and must conform to norms that were not set with their needs and experiences in mind. PREreview is committed to lowering such barriers and enabling participation for all. Thus far, with the exception of a few resources adapted and translated to French and Arabic, our work has been conducted exclusively in English. We seek funding to localize our preprint review platform and peer-review resources for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities. Beginning with Spanish and Portuguese is a natural choice for several reasons. With 3 reviews contributed in Portuguese and 2 contributed in Spanish, users have published more Portuguese- and Spanish-language reviews on the platform than reviews in any other non-English language. Authors submitting to SciELO Preprints—an international preprint server that allows submissions in Portuguese, Spanish, and English—will soon be able to request and be connected with PREreview reviewers via COAR Notify. In a pilot version of this workflow, PREreview received 421 requests from the SciELO community to review preprints. However, only 11 requests received reviews, a response that may be due to the fact that PREreview is presented as an English-language-only platform.
Proposed Activities: 1. Community localization user research. Our team has just begun implementing the COAR Notify protocol (https://www.coar-repositories.org/notify) that will allow preprint authors submitting to SciELO Preprints to request feedback from the PREreview community. As one of the first activities supported by this grant, we will host 2 community localization design sprints, 1 in Spanish and 1 in Portuguese, to solicit input from SciELO Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities on how to best present this option in the preprint submission workflow. We will partner with our collaborators at SciELO to design and disseminate a call for participation across their communities. Hosting these sprints will require time from our product and community teams to organize and facilitate the sprints, as well as translation and live interpretation services. Additionally, we will run up to 10 1:1 discovery interviews with SciELO community members, an activity that may also require translation and interpretation services. Sprint and interview participants will be offered compensation for their time and expertise. Timeline: November-December 2023: Discovery window for community design sprints and user research interviews with Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking community members. 2. Localization of PREreview website, PREreview resources, and community outreach materials. COAR Notify will help create connections between SciELO and PREreview communities, bringing current users of one platform to the other and vice versa. Therefore, there is a need to increase the accessibility of the PREreview site and resources to welcome new users from the SciELO community and beyond. To lower the barriers to participation of researchers whose first language is Spanish or Portuguese, we will engage with translators in the Latin American region to translate PREreview.org, which includes the preprint review authoring workflow and the descriptive static content on our website. Furthermore, we will coordinate the localization and translation of our Open Reviewers Toolkit (https://bit.ly/OR-Toolkit) which includes the Bias Reflection Guide, the Reviewer Guide, and the Review Assessment Rubric. Finally, we will develop community outreach materials in all three languages (English, Portuguese, and Spanish), including social media posts, blog posts, and posts for our community Slack channel. Timeline: January-March 2024: Translation and localization window for Portuguese and Spanish. 3. Adding language metadata to PREreviews. All our reviews are archived on Zenodo where they get a digital object identifier and associated searchable metadata. To make it easier to discover PREreviews authored in different languages, we will add language metadata to all PREreviews. This will also make it easier for us and others to quantify the impact of this work. Timeline: April-June 2024: Language metadata implementation.
Openness: At PREreview core to our mission is to prioritize the needs and expectations of researchers who have been traditionally marginalized in scholarly peer review. To us equity and openness are two inextricable ingredients needed to bring positive change to how research is shared and evaluated. As such, PREreview centers openness in the way we work in several dimensions. First, we are transparent about our partnerships and funding mechanisms and list them on our website. Additionally, all of our content including training resources, presentations and publications are openly available and licensed under CC BY 4.0. Finally, our preprint review platform has been built with openness as its basis. All the code for the site and platform is available on GitHub under MIT Licence (https://github.com/PREreview/prereview.org). All of the reviews posted on the platform are licensed under CC BY 4.0 and deposited on Zenodo, and we maintain relationships with projects who are advancing metadata standards in the field (e.g., COAR and DocMaps). As openness is built into the way we work, the outputs from this localization project will continue in our tradition of openly licensing materials and be housed in open infrastructure.
Challenges: Our work is limited by the perspectives, expertise, and experiences we have as a team and our ideas are influenced by the communities with which we are most closely connected. The proposed work will require the development of strong and trusting relationships with organizations serving Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities. Although this may present a challenge, we have experience building trusting relationships that have yielded successful projects with multiple organizations, including with SciELO. Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities are diverse in their idiomatic expression and academic vocabulary. To account for this diversity, our community sprints, translation activities, and outreach strategy will involve close collaboration with stakeholders within the SciELO community. The user research sprints will require live interpretation services, which we will source through our SciELO community connections. Although these necessary steps may pose a challenge in terms of our timeline, expenditure, and need for clear communication, our prior success in releasing timely deliverables within budget when seeking similar services helps to mitigate the associated concerns. Furthermore, seeking translation and live interpretation services from the SciELO community will ensure that we are collaborating with individuals who understand the context of preprints, which will augment the service and further increase the accessibility of content and associated deliverables.
Neglectedness: As part of the Community budget from our 2024 CZI grant, $10,000 was allocated to translation work on PREreview.org. With the help of this grant, we’ll be able to augment that line item so that we can work collaboratively with community members to not only translate but localize our review workflow and curricular resources with their input. Building on this work in the future, we will be better equipped to design new content for the linguistic needs of our users for whom English is not a first or preferred language.
Success: PREreview would measure success through our Spanish- and Portuguese-language community's engagement with our review authoring platform and training opportunities. More specifically, we would assess our work through metrics and associated activities like these: - PREreview and SciELO Preprints establish a SciELO PREreview Club that facilitates at least 5 Portuguese-language reviews and 5 Spanish-language reviews collaboratively authored by club members in 2024. - PREreview publishes 25 PREreviews authored in Portuguese or Spanish in 2024. - PREreview receives 100 requests to review Portuguese or Spanish-language preprints in 2024. - PREreview achieves a 10% response/review rate for requests to review Portuguese- or Spanish-language preprints in 2024. - Translated Open Reviewers Toolkit resources reach at least 500 views and 250 downloads from Zenodo.
Total Budget: 25,000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Code for Science and Society (Fiscal Sponsor)
LMIE Carveout: At the core of PREreview’s mission is to center equity. This equates to being very intentional with our efforts to foster an inclusive platform, community and events. As such, PREreview will be partnering with SciELO, a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals located in Brazil and with an expansive network across Latin America to localize PREreview’s platform and resources. We expect a majority of the collaborative work on translation and community co-creation will be conducted by individuals based in Latin America and facilitated in collaboration with SciELO. Ultimately, our goal with this work is to make our platform and resources more accessible in non-English speaking communities, many of which reside in LMIEs.
Team Skills: Several staff members are conversant or fluent in Spanish and can help facilitate the discovery work we need to do around linguistic diversity between Spanish speaking groups in the larger PREreview community and communicate those needs to interpretation and translation service providers. We recognize that for the success of this work we will need to rely on the collaboration with the SciELO. We are confident that our organizational values and our experience puts us in a strong position to successfully complete this project. Our team has years of experience conducting localization work and co-creation of resources in partnership with other organizations—one notable example is our collaboration with three African-based organizations that led to the development of resources for a train-the-trainer peer review workshop in English, French, and Arabic (https://bit.ly/OR-Africa). Moreover, our team has experience facilitating design sprints and soliciting community input that could guide our work. This year, we facilitated 4 user research design sprints that were attended by 53 members of our community representing 17 countries, 15 outside of the US, Europe, and the UK. Participants reported having a very positive experience, and their contributions have been invaluable in guiding the overhaul of some key platform features such as PREreview Clubs and Rapid PREreview workflows.
Submission Number: 73
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