KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The English language dominates scientific publishing, which creates multiple barriers for non-native English speakers.
• Practical initiatives from journals, alongside the use of new technologies, could remove these barriers and improve access to science.

Scientific research is expanding globally, but the persistent dominance of the English language in scientific publishing creates disadvantages for non-native English speakers. An editorial in Nature Human Behaviour discusses the impact of these barriers and what can be done to help.

Existing barriers

As highlighted by the editorial team, English-language dominance negatively impacts international science and decision-making. It also has a detrimental effect on researchers themselves. The group describe several instances of barriers experienced by non-native English scholars, particularly during the peer review process. These include:

• worse peer review outcomes, “probably due to reviewer and editor bias”
• differences in review outcomes, unless author identities were blinded
• bearing the resource burden and costs associated with any multi-lingual publishing or translation.

Removing barriers

The team describe how Nature Human Behaviour “strives for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion”, and the practical steps taken to try to achieve this. These include:

• publishing non-English-language translations and summaries to increase accessibility
• welcoming the inclusion of supplementary material in other languages
• considering research for peer review, regardless of language quality
• ensuring that correcting linguistic errors is not the responsibility of authors and peer reviewers, and that such errors are not barriers to publication.

Future directions

The editorial team also discuss the potential for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to improve the situation for non-native English speakers. For example, AI-based translation tools could help authors and journals to translate work into English, or allow readers to translate work published in English into their native language at the click of a button. In the meantime, the practical initiatives highlighted by Nature Human Behaviour serve as an example to everyone in medical publishing of steps we could all take to help remove language barriers.

The use of AI tools may help to overcome language barriers in scientific publishing.

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