Article

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

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Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

How can we build new multilingual futures for academic journals in the age of electronic publishing? The answer may lie in the multilingual pasts of scholarly publishing. This essay explores historical trajectories of journal editing to examine how the figure of the "editor" today has evolved in relation to the changing landscape of research since the inception of scholarly periodicals. It begins by exploring early multilingual practices of journals in the 17th and 18th centuries. The essay continues by exploring how multilingualism remained a mainstay of journals even with the boom in journals of the 19th century that emerged from research gaining a foothold in higher education institutions. It then considers how journals of the 20th and 21st century lost their way and foreclosed linguistic diversity in the increasing drive towards disciplinarity and the neoliberalization of higher education. The essay argues that another editorial workflow is possible, one that productively negotiates the tension between editor as gatekeeper of publishing and editor as steward of knowledge production. As such, it makes the case for a new approach to the work of journal editing better positioned to facilitate linguistic diversity and equity in scholarly communications.

Keywords: multilingualism, linguistic diversity, scholarly periodicals, academic journals, scholarly journals