Multilingualism in scholarly communications-NISO Plus

English may be the lingua franca of research, but too much focus on English-language publications and communications risks excluding the valuable contributions other researchers are making to our collective knowledge and understanding. This session will bring together speakers from organizations that are addressing this issue head-on by publishing in multiple languages, and providing tools and services to support non-English languages in innovative and practical ways.

The NISO Plus conference brings people together from across the global information community to share updates and participate in conversations about our shared challenges and opportunities. The focus is on identifying concrete next steps to improve information flow and interoperability, and help solve existing and potential future problems. Please join us to help address the key issues facing our community of librarians, publishers, researchers, and more — today and tomorrow!

Harini Calamur heads Impact Science, that works with academia – researchers, labs, universities, publishers, society, and government – to make research more accessible. We do this by using both technology, and human expertise. We work to summarize, visualize, and create audio, video, and text summaries. We work a lot with non-native English speakers, and have been helping their research reach a wider market (in English) . Currently we are working on projects in government funded projects in  three countries to get research disseminated and communicated, across the world to key audiences. We also work with Western Publishers and Academic societies to take research in English to markets in China (localizing it). Harini has 20+ years of media and communications experience – working across media types and formats.

Jasmin Lange is Chief Publishing Officer at Brill, an international scholarly publisher founded in the Netherlands in 1683. Brill publishes books, journals and reference works in the Humanities, International Law and the Social Sciences. Supporting the publication of scholarship in various languages has traditionally been at the heart of Brill’s mission. Jasmin’s background is in Book History and Business Management. Next to her work at Brill she is a board member at STM, the HSS division of the Dutch Research Council, and the Center for Research Libraries.

Jessica Clark is the Project Coordinator of Coalition Publica, a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. While her current work focuses on journal publishing, her background is in scholarly book publishing, with previous positions at the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP) and the University of Ottawa Press. French-English bilingualism has been a common aspect of all her professional work to date.

Kath Burton (she/her) is head of portfolio development for the humanities at Routledge, Taylor & Francis. With over 15 years’ experience working in scholarly communications Kath has worked in a variety of publishing roles from commissioning and programme management to designing and implementing effective publishing strategies for scholarly societies and journal editorial teams. Kath’s main area of focus is to discover new opportunities for digital, open and public humanities, using human-centred design techniques and deeply embedding within research and practice communities. She co-leads the Publishing and Public Humanities working group, and when not working in publishing, Kath co-grows community gardens in Reading, UK.