Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication

The signatories of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication support the following recommendations to be adopted by policy-makers, leaders, universities, research institutions, research funders, libraries, and researchers: 1. Support dissemination of research results for the full benefit of the society. - Make sure researchers are merited for disseminating research results beyond academia and for interacting with heritage, culture, and society. - Make sure equal access to researched knowledge is provided in a variety of languages. 2. Protect national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research - Make sure not-for-profit journals and book publishers have both sufficient resources and the support needed to maintain high standards of quality control and research integrity. - Make sure national journals and book publishers are safeguarded in their transition to open access. 3. Promote language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems. - Make sure that in the process of expert-based evaluation, high quality research is valued regardless of the publishing language or publication channel. - Make sure that when metrics-based systems are utilized, journal and book publications in all languages are adequately taken into account.