WG Objectives
By addressing language diversity and biases in assessment, this WG supports the EU (and other) institutions in fulfilling their duty to enhance, promote and uphold linguistic equity, diversity and non-discrimination in Europe and globally. This requires fostering an academic culture that values diverse competencies, interactions and communications in all languages without exclusions or priorities.
The main objectives are:
- to raise awareness across all fields about the importance of “multilingualism in practice of science, in scientific publications and in academic communications”(UNESCO);
- to provide institutions with guidelines, toolbox and implementation proposal for recognizing, rewarding and incentivizing research carried out and communicated in all languages, and for addressing language biases in metrics, expert-assessment and rankings.
Activities will be carried out by Task Forces (TF) producing specific Deliverables, and five interest groups (IG) will represent topics or stakeholders throughout activities.
Task Forces and their leads are:
– TF1: Coordination (lead: TSV)
– TF2: Landscape Analysis (lead: AMU, LEI, UAntwerp, ANVUR, ECSPM)
– TF3: Policy Advice and Implementation (lead: ANR, Coimbra Group, ISE, OPERAS, UHR, CNR, UTU)
– TF4: Communication (lead: MCAA)
The IGs and their coordinators are:
– Early career researchers (lead: Eurodoc)
– Civil society (lead: ECSPM)
– Intersectionality (lead: UNIMIB, CNR)
– Language learning and skills (lead: Tour4EU)
– Open Scholarly communication (lead: LEI, CLACSO/FOLEC)
The WG will implement several mechanisms for a continuous involvement of CoARA members and other organisations, making sure that they will be able to contribute to and be actively involved in, and benefit from the WG activities.
CoARA members will be invited to: contribute data;, respond to and distribute surveys; andparticipate in case studies for the landscape analyses; comment through open consultations on each core WG output; and participate in the IGs to make sure that the topics and stakeholder perspectives are taken into account throughout the WG activities.
The WG will also promote a series of online workshops and webinars to share, present and detail its outputs, for instance how to use the toolbox. Online meetings will be organised to cover several time zones to facilitate participation beyond Europe. In-person workshops can be held within events organised by WG members.