Retrospective on the Symposium québécois des revues savantes

Three Areas of Work

1. Publication in French

In a context where the domination of English on scientific communication is becoming more and more entrenched, we are witnessing a generalized linguistic impoverishment in scholarly communication. Publishing in French is thus a major issue for scholarly journals in Québec and Canada. Discussions held during the Symposium touched on the systemic nature of the rapid decline in the number of articles published in French, which is directly linked to current practices in research evaluation and the promotion of professors, adopted by universities and granting agencies. The metrics most commonly used to calculate prestige, such as the Impact Factor, were created for English-language publications, which are still assigned disproportionate value.

The workshop groups raised the question of how to strengthen the legitimacy of French-language publications and to promote them further. An important recommendation that arose from those discussions was to avoid believing that technology, particularly automatic translation, would provide a miracle solution. Putting measures in place to promote publications in languages other than English will require real political will and a concerted action plan that brings together all academic instances.

2. Recognizing the Role of Journals

The second area stemmed from the shared observation that the role and scope of scholarly journals are often misunderstood, notably by their home institutions, and reduced to manuscript evaluation. However, even at the article level, journals do much more as they play a key role in producing and disseminating knowledge, providing field-specific results to researchers and students, which become in turn the starting point for further research. 

More generally, journals are living spaces that organize and activate their research communities, whether within editorial teams, among the authors being published, or through the evaluators that guarantee the quality of the articles selected for publication. They play a key role in training young researchers by working closely with them on their manuscripts. Editorial teams invest a lot of time in this task which is often done unseen in the background, while remaining essential to training the next generation. Discussions at the Symposium stressed the importance of better recognition of the full range of roles that journals play within the research cycle.

3. The Expertise of Editorial Teams

The third area focused on the skills held by editorial teams, a facet that is all the more important as they have been operating in an environment undergoing profound changes in the last thirty years. Beyond their discipline-specific expertise, scholars who run publications need to acquire several skill sets, built and constantly updated over the years. This work not only requires effort, but also time, a very rare resource in the contemporary academic world.

While modes of dissemination change rapidly and the transition to open access is accelerating, the development and transfer of the skills held by editorial teams require continuous support from the whole of the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem. The key role played by academic libraries in this should be amplified and coordinated, as a complement to the services offered by Érudit’s team.

The discussions at the Symposium also brought attention to the challenges created by the immense and essential task of decolonizing scientific publishing, which is ever more urgent. The hypothesis of a collaborative and mutual aid network grouping together Québec-based scholarly journals also emerged from these exchanges, which insisted on a structure as horizontal as possible.