Towards the end of 2023 we announced our new Open Access Fund and following on from that we are delighted to tell you that we have made five of our backlist titles available as Open Access publications. All five are available under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
We are pleased to announce the creation of the Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters Open Access Fund. We will fully fund at least one open access publication each year to support authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to fund open access publication for their work. These books will be published online in an open access format with no access restrictions or paywalls under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
This new fund aims to increase visibility, dissemination, use and impact of top-quality academic research, particularly for research originating in Low to Middle Income Countries and scholars working outside of traditional academic institutions. Open access publications can be shared freely around the world with no restrictions and remain permanently available in digital format. We hope that by removing the barriers from publications, authors can benefit from achieving increased impact across the world and greater engagement with their research.
All our open access publications are subject to the same rigorous peer review process and high publishing standards as our regular publications.
Alongside these funded publications, we will continue to publish open access titles on a Book Processing Charge (BPC) and Chapter Processing Charge (CPC) basis. We published our first open access title, Second Language Pronunciation Assessment, edited by Talia Isaacs and Pavel Trofimovich, in 2016 and since then have continued to offer the option of open access publication to those with funding. This new fund will enable us to offer the open access option to those who have no funding available to them.
For details of all our existing open access books please see our website.
How you can contribute to the fund
We are offering our authors the opportunity to donate their royalties to this fund, with a commitment to a matching contribution of 100%, up to a maximum of £10,000 per year. These author donations will go towards additional open access publications over and above the ones we are funding ourselves.
Blanca Yaneth González Pinzón: Memory and New Ways of Knowing: Weaving Narratives from the Armed Conflict in Colombia
The 2025 Open Access Fund
If your book is already under contract and you’d like it to be considered for the 2025/2026 Open Access Fund please get in touch with Anna Roderick (anna@channelviewpublications.com) and she will let you know how to submit your book to be considered for the fund.
In June 2009, John Edwards, editor of the Multilingual Matters book series, contacted Durk. He suggested writing a general book on the subject of Linguistic Landscape. In John’s words, “this would be the book that scholars would turn to when wanting an introduction, an overview, and an assessment of this emerging field.” At the time, the field of Linguistic Landscapes was flourishing and it was obviously gaining traction. An increasing number of researchers had started to carry out inspiring studies, presented their work at conferences, and published numerous articles and book chapters. The series of annual Linguistic Landscapes workshops kicked off in Tel Aviv in January 2008 and has now celebrated its 14th edition in September 2023 in Madrid.
As usual, our problem was that we were involved in carrying out too many projects, preparing presentations and writing publications. We could not find the concentration and the time to write such a book on Linguistic Landscape studies. Moreover, as Durk wrote back to John: “I tried to design a table of contents for a full-length book. Yet, I came to the conclusion that although many exciting things are going on in the field of linguistic landscape studies, it is not ‘mature’ or ‘coherent’ enough to write such a full-length study.” The plan for the book remained for a long time on the back burner on our list of future plans.
Over the years, we remained active working with Linguistic Landscape data. We published several articles and chapters, for example, on Linguistic Landscapes inside multilingual schools or on Linguistic Landscapes and translanguaging. However, our focus was on multilingual education.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, under strict lockdown, we started to design the book and we systematically collected published data on Linguistic Landscape studies. We drafted a table of contents, which was changed several times, and we started the writing process. Other commitments often had to be given priority and frequently delayed the process, but now the result is here.
Of course, a book like this implies making many choices. For example, numerous studies were not included, because we considered those not to belong to the field, whereas others might disagree. As the reader will notice, the book is richly illustrated with over 90 photographs in colour (!) of signage we had seen with our own eyes. The selection of the illustrations was a complex and difficult process. With this blog, we include two photos that for different reasons did not make it to the book. The first we considered for the cover of the book because it has the word “Panorama”. The photo illustrates the difficulty of knowing in which language a sign is. This photo was taken in Beynac in France, so probably it is French. However, the word panorama can just as well be English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Frisian or even Basque. The second photo is the only sign we have that combines Basque and Frisian, the two languages we have studied most. The statement in three languages “Leave your language trail” is what we intend to do with this book.
Durk Gorter, Ikerbasque Research Professor and University of the Basque Country
(durk.gorter@gmail.com)
Dear Colleagues, Readers and Accomplices in the work of Decolonising Multilingualism,
This blog post makes available the Manifesto for Decolonising Multilingualism, which is taken from my book of that title. It’s available as a download/e-pamphlet but like any decolonising task, and any academic work, this was neither the work of one individual nor is it complete. As Francis Nyamanjoh says in his recent article (2019), ‘Decolonising the University in Africa’[1] the work ahead, as with its decolonising antecedents, requires
a convivial scholarship that dwells less on zero-sum games of absolute winners and losers, encourages a disposition of incompleteness and humility through the reality of the ubiquity of debt and indebtedness, and finds strength in themes of interconnections, interdependences, compositeness, and incompleteness […].
In this spirit we would like you to add to the manifesto as an activity for the commons, engaging in dialogue, disputing and creating additional ideas, stories and reflections which may benefit the hard common task of decolonising multilingualism, not least in our teaching and learning in universities.
Alison Phipps
You can freely access and download A Short Manifesto for Decolonising Multilingualismhere. Please do feel free to use the comments section of this blog post to continue the conversation.
For more information about Decolonising Multilingualism please see our website.
[1] Nyamanjoh, Francis ‘Decolonising the University in Africa’ in OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, Oxford University Press, 2019.
Although English academic writing has facilitated communication between scholars from different parts of the world, it has at the same time contributed to complex forms of academic imperialism, which harmfully interferes with knowledge creation and dissemination in languages other than English. In 2016, I published a book with Multilingual Matters about dominant discourses regarding mother tongue-based multilingual education in the Iranian context. The book, entitled Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education?, was written based on interviews with influential scholars of multilingual education and language rights in order to contribute ideas to the mother tongue education debate in Iran. The open access publication of the Farsi translation of the book recently became possible thanks to Multilingual Matters – who provided the copyright – and University of Dayton – who published the ebook. In this blog post, I briefly write about the significance of the publication of the translation of the book.
Academic publishing in English has created a global community of scholars who share thoughts and experiences about a wide range of topics including global issues that occur outside the English speaking world. Academics working in the Anglo-American world write about other people’s cultural practices, languages, literature, art, and education. Western scholars even write the histories of non-western populations in English, the de facto academic lingua franca. On the other hand, non-English speaking international researchers are also pressured to publish in English for promotion, a trend encouraged by university ranking dynamics. This trend, on the bright side, has been a blessing in that we become aware of issues and conversations in many parts of the world. There is, however, a darker side to this status.
The journal industry and academic publishing apparatus are practically at the service of promoting a commercialized higher education, which uses researchers’ work for marketing purposes as well as knowledge dissemination. Academics’ publications in this sense become the window of the higher education marketplace in the West for potential shoppers. This approach has serious consequences for knowledge creation and consumption. Most accessible knowledge today is packaged in English, which has practically made non-English academic texts be perceived as less reliable. Also, university libraries have become the main customers of publishers because the books are sold at high prices, alienating public audiences – including non-English speaking populations. For researchers, this means investing their lives into books and papers that would only be read by a small number of readers, or even not read at all. At the same time, academics are pressured to publish more and more, resulting in a focus on quantity and repetition rather than quality and originality.
When it comes to international scholars the situation is even worse. International scholars whose research focuses on local contexts beyond the English speaking world are typically required by their institutions to publish in English. International scholars have to write in a language other than their mother tongue and compete with English speaking scholars who are often already connected with the English academic publishing and journal industry. Just as problematically, international researchers’ work often involves local issues, but because their findings are published in English, local populations have almost no access to the results of the research that was conducted for studying their cultures. This phenomenon raises serious epistemological questions about knowledge dissemination and the positionality of researchers as well as significant conversations about ethics of academic publishing.
The Farsi translation of Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education? bent this model in favour of the population that the book was written about and, to a large degree, written for: Iranian educators. With the situation of mother tongue-based multilingual education in Iran in the background, the book brought together prominent scholars of language policy and linguistic rights in different parts of the world to respond to the doubts and questions of Iranian educators and ethnic mother tongue activists. Although the outcome of this conversation was an analysis of sociopolitical discourses that are meant to undermine the role of minoritized languages all over the world, the catalyst of our conversations was the challenges minoritized students are facing in today’s Iran. Thus, one ideal audience among others for this book would naturally be Iranian teachers eager to learn about effective policies and practices in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, the academic publishing industry has not been designed for interaction with native populations.
Iranian language teachers – especially those in disadvantaged provinces where minority languages are suppressed – would never be able to afford the English book. In some cases the price of one copy of the book would equal an Iranian teacher’s monthly income. Even if an enthusiastic teacher decided to make such an investment, he or she still would have no access to the book. A combination of western sanctions and the Iranian government’s strict censorship policies has practically made the distribution of the book in Iran impossible. Most foreign publishers have no active presence in Iran; online retailers such as Amazon do not provide service in Iran; and western credit card companies have no reach within the country and its banking system, which makes online shopping impossible. In these circumstances, the educators who practically own the conversation which the English book presents have no access to the text written about their lives.
The English version of Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education? was not funded in any form. The book was not connected to the participating scholars’ sponsored research. The publication was the fruit of personal commitment and interest of researchers who deeply cared about minoritized students. The translator of the book similarly decided to pen the Farsi version out of personal passion without our knowledge. He had finished the translation months before he contacted me to share news about his work. When I approached Multilingual Matters and the University of Dayton about the possibility of open access publication of the book and highlighted the fact that such a move could break the current mode of elite academic publishing, they did not hesitate to support the free online publication of the Farsi version and worked hard to guarantee the high quality of the publication. Multilingual Matters generously provided the translator with the rights to the Farsi version and offered moral support. The manager of University of Dayton’s E-scholarship also worked hard to release the book in the best possible format as soon as possible.
I am grateful to Multilingual Matters and University of Dayton for supporting the open access publication of the translation of my work. Apart from my personal interest in the project, their decision, I believe, has had important ideological, sociocultural, and economic implications. The translation resists the English-only stance of mainstream academic publishing industry. It provides access to local educators who are the real owners of the book content and invites them to share their thoughts about the debate. In other words, the conversation is no longer about them but with them. Additionally, the free online distribution of the book creates access for native teachers who are often financially disadvantaged. It is fair to see this experience as an example of how we can democratize the academic publishing industry and perhaps remedy some of the effects of the current academic colonialism.
Amir Kalan
For more information about Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education? please see our website. You can access the Farsi translation of the book here.
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 