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The push towards making research free and open to read, in all its parts and forms, from data sets to published output, is a big topic in scholarly communication. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the attitudes and experiences of researchers in language and society when it comes to open research. A new survey is designed to change that.

(Image credit: James Sutton, via Unsplash)

Why is open research important?

The majority of research published with academic publishers remains available only by purchase or subscription, primarily either by an individual researcher or through an institutional library. This significantly limits access.

Open research goes right to the heart of the scholarly mission. After all, scholarship is committed “to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges” (Draft Recommendations of the MIT Task Force on Open Access).

This obviously involves increasing the ability of anyone, anywhere, to read the results and output of scholarly research. For that to happen, research has to be accessible.

When research is open and free to read, it is more visible, potentially more discoverable, and allows researchers internationally to discuss, cooperate, and collaborate. There is a general consensus that open research is more widely read and, as a consequence, more highly cited (Piwowar, et al, 2018).

Another reason relates to equity and inclusion. Making scholarly work free to read removes one barrier to access for those who cannot afford to pay themselves, or work for an institution who cannot cover the costs.

Despite the obvious advantages of open research, the case for it is not clear-cut.

Open access is confusing

It is fair to say that scholars feel increasingly overwhelmed by the constantly changing open research landscape.

Institutions and funding bodies demand that research results are made available openly, but the constraints on which outlet is acceptable is often unclear. There is often a lack of transparency around who pays the price to cover open access publication and what that price is.

In addition to the financial cost is the additional work. It is not always clear whether an open access publication will receive the same level of shepherding, editing, and proofreading from the publisher as a traditional publication or whether the burden is on the author. Some publishers are clear that this is the case, others are less transparent. Some sit in between. Language Science Press, for example, who offer cost-free, open access and peer reviewed publishing, require competency in LaTex for manuscript preparation, or the availability of student assistants who do.

(Image credit: Emily Morter, via Unsplash)

This lack of consistent approach leads to a continued suspicion that an open access publication is less prestigious. This is of particular concern where we are in an ever more competitive job market and every publication choice weighs heavily in the tenure and promotion process. Can early career researchers risk prioritizing open access, if it means choosing a publication with a less prestigious press or a lower impact factor journal? Are more established scholars making choices to publish open access that will help their younger colleagues chose this pathway, too?

Is open access the opposite of academic capitalism?

Open access can be seen, in part, as push back against the consolidation of power, function, and wealth of a small number of large commercial publishers. To engage these commercial entities in a process that will ensure they increase their open access offerings, large institutional and national library consortia are increasingly leveraging their power. Organizations in the US and Germany, for example, have signed agreements on behalf of researchers to enable easier and cheaper access to academic publications.

Some scholars, such as those from the scholar-led or radical open access movements, argue that we should refrain entirely from publishing texts with commercial publishers or in publications that are pay-walled and cost money to read.

Predatory publishing

Digital publishing and open access has also led to a dramatic increase in predatory and fraudulent publishers. It can be incredibly difficult to distinguish legitimate open access publishing entities from predatory ones.

There have been attempts to monitor and list predatory publishers and journals, for example Beall’s List, but these have not been without controversy. The endeavor of creating lists of bad actors can also seem Sisyphean, as the rate at which dubious publishers and conference organizers appear happens with incredible speed. There is research that indicates that “for the most part, young and inexperienced researchers from developing countries” are the ones most susceptible to the entreaties of these publishers (see also Demir, 2018).

Which brings us to our survey!

As mentioned above, we’ve put this survey together to help us better understand the challenges and opportunities relating to open access publishing in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

The survey includes some basic demographic data gathering: where people are located, what positions they hold, where they completed their doctoral work, and what particular area of research they work in. We include these questions in order to better understand if there are geographical differences or variation depending on seniority. We’ve also included some questions relating to technology and social media in order to understand how researchers are using these channels to promote their work. We also include some definitional questions: Open access, open science, open research, and open data are all part of a range of related yet different concepts. We would like to know what framework people are using when they say ‘open access’.

The questionnaire covers a range of questions relating to researchers’ current practices and future plans. If researchers are publishing open access, how are they funding those publications? We also want to know whether those that have published open access have experienced different approaches from the publisher on aspects of manuscript preparation like copy-editing and proofreading.

We are also interested in understanding whether researchers in our field are being compelled by funding bodies or institutional policies to make their work open. Finally, we’d like to know whether researchers see the practice of making work freely readable as being part of an effort to distribute knowledge more equitably.

Why should you take the survey?

Research on open access publishing practices points to a need for a more detailed understanding of what is happening at a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary level. And while many researchers in sub-disciplines that focus on the nexus between language and society care about the impact of their research beyond their small disciplinary bubble, there are still substantial gaps in our knowledge.

Through the survey, we want to get a clearer picture of attitudes towards and experiences with open research in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

With our combined research, teaching, and publishing experience, the three of us feel that the first step is to understand the open research landscape in language and society. From there, we hope that more can be done to propel open research forward.

If you are a student or a guest researcher (like me) in Berlin and you need to get or renew a visa or need to change your visa status, you need to wait. The Ausländerbehörde (Immigration Office), which serves Berlin’s non-German citizens, is open three days a week (Monday and Tuesday from 7am to 2pm, Thursday from 10am to 6pm) and as a student you cannot make an appointment. Instead, you have to arrive during office hours and take a number. If there are no more numbers, you cannot talk to an official and you have to try again. Usually you learn, through trial and error, that you must arrive at least one hour, often two, before the office opens and wait outside in order to get a number. It is always nice when your visa renewal time falls in the summer rather than the winter months.

There are no instructions on the official website to tell you about these lengthy waiting times (not even in German!), and no officials offering information about the procedure. The small amount of information you can gather about where to stand and how long to wait comes from the people around you. Everyone waiting uses the language resources they have: L2 German, English, Turkish, among many other languages, attempting to work out if the person ahead or behind them has better information about what is going on. During the wait, strangers share stories about previous experiences at the office.

The monolingual German signage at the Ausländerbehörde stands in stark contrast to the linguistically diverse waiting crowd.

Berlin, in general, is a multilingual city. You hear many languages as you walk the streets: you learn Turkish words when you do your groceries and read ads in Polish, English and Arabic, alongside German, on the trains. The government department for Integration and Migration makes their website available in German, English, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, and Turkish and boasts that Berlin “was and is a city of immigrants. Immigrants from numerous countries”. 13.7% of Berlin’s population are not German citizens. Why is it then that at the Ausländerbehörde, where clients by definition speak German as an additional language if at all, there is no multilingual information?

Not only is the limited official information provided only in German, it is contradictory and confusing. The writing is small and it takes a number of readings to work out which floor it is you need to go to. In fact, on my first visit I read the sign (above), saw ‘Australien’ and, after confirming with the woman at the front desk (who told me she does not have a phone line, so cannot call any of the offices to get further information), I went to wait on the 3^rd floor. After finally talking to an official I was sent to the 1^st floor where I was meant to be waiting (as a guest academic) to wait some more.

There are a few glimpses of recognition that people navigating the immigration office might need assistance beyond this monolingual signage. A smaller sign (left) indicates the separate entrance for Turkish nationals, the largest group of applicants in Berlin, and includes the German for the country’s name in addition to the Turkish flag. It is unclear, however, which entrance you should choose if you are a visiting academic from Turkey. There is no Turkish language presence at all, only the Turkish flag acknowledging Turkish nationals while quietly insisting on German monolingualism.

What does all of this say about language on the move and social inclusion in a multilingual city? The Ausländerbehörde makes it clear that the nation remains the great arbiter of access to resources and that exclusion is enforced through lack of information in even the major L2s of the country. Offering information in other languages for ‘Ausländer’ (foreigners) challenges the legitimacy of the one language, one nation tie and yet for the people waiting in line speaking, multilingualism is the only way to access information.

The fellow pictured is German comedian Kaya Yanar, who has made a living from comedic characters that consist of exaggerations and stereotypes of various immigrant groups. He’s best known for his show “Was guckst Du?” which translates into English as “What are you looking at?” and refers to staring as a form of passive-aggressive social control in German society. Staring is used as a means to express implicit social disapproval of the looks of another person and foreigners are often the object of “the stare.” The question “Was guckst Du?” is a form of resistance as it forces the silent disapprover to either make their criticism explicit or to respond with a cowardly “oh, nothing, nothing.”

One of the characters in “Was guckst Du?” is the pictured Hakan, a Turkish immigrant to Germany, who works as a nightclub bouncer. Hakan speaks in an exaggerated form of Turkish-German, although Yanar himself is an L1 German speaker. His comedy is of a pretty common ‘ethnic comedy’ variety, drawing on circulating stereotypes to get a laugh. It seems that “Lümütüd Edition”, then, is supposed to be an imitation of Hakan speaking English, and yet, as far as I’ve been able to gather, the character Hakan never speaks English in Yanar’s show and neither does Yanar. So what’s going on?

It is a case of multilingual advertising, with a twist. The English ‘Limited Edition’ is in common usage on German products. Hakan’s cartoonish representation of a Turkish immigrant bouncer is then layered on top, producing a consumable snack of multicultural ‘döner’ meets ‘crisps’. The gratuitous umlauts serve to make the English phrase look like mock Turkish and sound like accented English.

The designation of the chips’ flavor adds to the stereotyped language: “Döner mit alles” translates as “Doner kebab with everything.” The grammatically correct form would be “Döner mit allem” and the form of the expression thus mimics foreigner talk, or, more specifically, a form of uneducated and fossilized “Turkish German.” The Lorenz snack food company takes Yanar’s ready-made caricature: greased-back hair, accentedness, and foreigner talk, and commodifies it, with a sprinkling of contemporary advertising multilingualism (English-as-mock-Turkish) to top it off.

With anti-immigration (specifically anti-Islamic immigration) discourses in political advertising in other parts of German-speaking Europe being unapologetically racist, it’s hard to see past the stereotypes and language mockery to find the humor in Hakan, or the chips.

You can read more about ‘ethno-comedy’ in the German context (in German) in: Keding, K., & Struppert, A. (2006). Ethno-Comedy im deutschen Fernsehen: Inhaltsanalyse und Rezipientenbefragung zu “Was guckst du?!”. Berlin: Frank & Timme.