Promoting global, multilingual open scholarship and bibliodiversity by supporting article metadata in all languages

Joanna Ball, Dominic Mitchell

Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica

Problem Statement: Bibliodiversity is vital for a healthy, diverse, thriving international scholarly communication landscape and facilitates faster and smoother scholarship. The current predominance of the English language negatively affects how scholarship is communicated, absorbed, and studied, especially in the social sciences, humanities and arts, where language is so inextricably linked to culture and identity. In a recent presentation, Tatsuya Amano, a conservation scientist at the UQ Centre for Biodiversity & Conservation Science, showed how the predominance of English in science actively hinders scholarship. The Helsinki Initiative, of which DOAJ was one of the first signatories, is a unified attempt to promote multilingualism in scholarship and underlines the importance of language diversity, among other things. Over 42% of the journals in DOAJ are hosted on OJS, the open-source journal hosting software. Over 48% of those journals operate in more than one language. The journals indexed in DOAJ publish across 84 languages, and many depend on DOAJ for the visibility of their research. DOAJ is only able to display article metadata in one language, which means that translated versions to make the article available in more than one language cannot be loaded to DOAJ. We want to be able to display multilanguage article metadata to enhance the visibility and impact of research from multilingual journals for the benefit of the wider global research community.

Proposed Activities: We expect the work to start in November 2023 and be completed by the end of March 2024. (This allows for team holidays in December.) DOAJ already contracts its technical services from Cottage Labs. Here are the dominant tasks needed to reach our goal: 1. Upgrading and changing the Article model itself 2. Updating the web forms 3. Implementing and supporting a new API version, including its deprecation and ultimate removal 4. Updating the API documentation 5. Updating the public view of the data 6. Updating the DOAJ XML XSD and managing the old version's deprecation. / Including vital comms to our community, here is a timeline: NOVEMBER: scope each dominant task and turn them into development items; Project planning, including identifying material to be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, French; Comms to the community to alert them of the project and gather feedback, requirements, things to watch out for; Start development work; Check-in with PKP to alert them to the project. JANUARY: Progress update to the community; continue development. FEBRUARY: Testing and release of first items, rolling through to March; Communication with the community. MARCH: Testing and release; Monitoring of feedback, bug fixes; Social media campaign, blog post, comms to all stakeholder groups in multiple languages; Go-live.

Openness: DOAJ is the world’s leading and most inclusive directory of open access journals. DOAJ is committed to maintaining its journal reviewing services and its journal and article metadata available for free. All article metadata is available under the CC0 waiver. Over 42% of the journals in DOAJ use OJS, the open-source journal hosting software. Through plugins developed by the PKP community, we see many multilingual article abstracts submitted to us. The project will require direct involvement with this community to meet their needs. 100% of DOAJ’s code sits in an open GitHub repository and is licensed with an open Apache license (version 2). It can be forked at any time. Any new code developed in this project will also be available in that repository. Regular project updates will be shared directly with the PKP community of journals and editors, via their own Mattermost instance and via their community manager, with whom DOAJ has close contact. Updates and lessons learnt will be posted on the DOAJ news service and our social media channels, which have over 44,000 followers in total.

Challenges: The challenges can be split into two categories: technical and non-technical. TECHNICAL. The work requires numerous updates to very exposed and public parts of the DOAJ infrastructure that many publishers and individual journals rely on, namely the XML upload feature, the API, our XSD files, etc. Our biggest challenge will be ensuring a seamless transition to the new structure. We must ensure that backward compatibility is total and allows XML and JSON deposits to be made without breaking the many existing integrations. This will require testing and careful coordination. NON-TECHNICAL. We must ensure adequate communication with the different stakeholder groups that comprise our diverse and global community to alert them to the changes and encourage them to resupply their multilingual content to us. This particularly applies to the OJS community. We must encourage our content providers to transition to the new structure and send us multilingual article abstracts.

Neglectedness: From discussions with the Helsinki Initiative community, very few funders support initiatives promoting or encouraging multilingualism in scholarship. Despite numerous calls from the scholarly community for increased multilingualism, more needs to be achieved in this area. (See https://jussieucall.org/jussieu-call/, https://trios.pubpub.org/pub/del45l8w/release/1, https://nisoplus2021.cadmore.media/Title/9eb2f99e-77af-4f69-a5ef-0ed654323c41) We haven’t previously applied for funding for this work, as we have been unable to identify suitable funding sources for a small but impactful project like this to enhance our core infrastructure.

Success: We will use the following measures as indicators of success: An increase in the number of article abstracts uploaded to DOAJ; An increase in the number of non-English languages covered by articles in our database: https://doaj.org/search/articles; An increase in successful integrations from multilingual journals; An increase in the number of article abstracts. (We know, for example, that many Canadian journals will only upload abstracts to us once we can support content in both English and French.) Using the data visualisation that has been provided by one of our Indonesian Ambassadors and is publicly available here: http://ejournal.unand.ac.id/node/115, we will also be able to measure, in real-time: the increase of non-English keywords in our database; An increase in article coverage by year.

Total Budget: $22,000

Affiliations: Infrastructure Services for Open Access (of which DOAJ is a service)

LMIE Carveout: DOAJ’s core team of 25 is predominantly European-based. We have team members from Algeria, Singapore, Peru, Venezuela, India, China, Egypt, and Turkey, among other countries, so we have good first-hand knowledge of scholarly communities in LMIEs. DOAJ has a global volunteer community and Ambassador network of 100 individuals from over 26 countries. Our user community is global in the range of journals indexed, the range of applications submitted to us, and usage patterns. DOAJ is an important resource for finding quality open access research for communities in LMIEs. Through our global network of Ambassadors, we work actively with publishers in LMIEs to adhere to publishing standards so that they can be indexed in DOAJ and achieve greater global visibility.

Team Skills: The project manager has ten years of experience working at DOAJ and detailed knowledge of the platform and metadata structures. DOAJ’s technical partner, Cottage Labs, has collaborated with us to develop and host the platform since 2012. They have in-depth knowledge of the system, technical capacity, and skills to carry out the work. Communication with DOAJ’s international community of journals and journal platforms will be supported by our volunteer Ambassador network, which has existing expertise in journal publishing and established networks and would be coordinated by our Community Manager, a full-time team member. Work done by the ambassadors connects us with governmental departments, national funders, journal platforms, and regional networks.

Submission Number: 104