Without sustained academic thinking about how a language renews its speakers’ relationship with the world, any language gradually loses its relevance in decision-making and public life. Increasingly, younger scholars outside the former European empires and their now independent settler-colonies in neo-Europe have to choose between nuanced expression in their native languages or an ‘international’ career in simpler English. Choosing the latter entails adopting a second or third language where affective relations with words and concepts are less organic and readership cannot be assumed to understand local conditions. With Internet and AI tools at their fingertips and less and less time and funding for language checking and style editing, scholars are not encouraged to care about polished style or affective significance. As a native speaker of Finnish, a language with about six million speakers worldwide, my experiences in translating as well as having had my work translated into other languages that I understand, has underscored these detrimental effects, especially in the Arts and Humanities. In the following, I focus on the effects of English dominance on publishing and evaluation systems to encourage scholars to think strategically about how and where to disseminate their research.
The hegemony of English as an academic lingua franca means that publishing research in smaller languages – not only endangered or minority languages but even national languages with speakers in the millions – is increasingly unsustainable, both financially and socially. Currently, translators are losing their jobs because Large Language Models (LLMs) drop the price point customers are willing to pay, even though the smaller the language and the more specific the scholarly topic, the likelier it is that LLMs fail, missing nuance and creating outright errors or hallucinations. Since languages are conceptual universes that condition thinking, including creative endeavours, academic discourse in a particular language requires new scholarship published in that language and readers willing to engage with that discourse. Translations are a crucial part of this discourse. For indigenous languages like the Sámi languages in the Nordic countries, reviving language and culture after centuries of eradication efforts by colonizing majority languages in the area has also meant creating an academic discourse in those languages, often with multiple translations (see e.g. https://site.uit.no/aigecala/ for an introduction in Norwegian to Sámi dieđalaš áigečála, and https://www.dutkansearvi.fi/home/ for English language introduction to Dutkansearvi).
From the perspective of journals, a neoliberal ‘publish or perish’ culture that equates success with productivity favours English through impact factor and citation indexes calculated by for-profit companies like Clarivate (Web of Science) and Elsevier (Scopus). These tools promote publishers in Europe and neo-Europe at the expense of the Global South. (According to Scopus’ Content Coverage Guide (https://www.elsevier.com/products/scopus/content#0-content-coverage, pdf chapter 4.3), of their active titles, the vast majority – 13819 – are located in Western Europe, with an additional 2282 in Russia and Eastern Europe, 6968 are based in North America, 944 in Central & South America, 1017 in the Middle East and Africa put together, 2687 in Asia Pacific, and 231 in Australia and New Zealand. Of their c. 27950 titles, nearly 50% are in Western Europe, compared to c. 3% in Central and South America or less than 10% for the Asia Pacific region that includes both China and India.) To counterbalance these commercial systems, some European countries have sought to establish their own ranking systems that seek to place publications in local languages on the same scale. In addition to focusing on local needs, these systems have also sought to evaluate output and peer review practices also in fields underrepresented in these impact factor and citation indexes. In my native Finland, this effort resulted in the Publication Forum, 'a classification of publication channels created by the Finnish scientific community to support the quality assessment of academic research' (https://www.julkaisufoorumi.fi/en) administered by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (https://tsv.fi/en) for the purposes of quality assessment. The Publication Forum only ranks publications in which scholars based in Finland have published their research.
The Publication Forum has 23 panels, divided by academic field, each with members nominated by institutions of higher education and learned societies in that field. Panel members are unpaid volunteers appointed by the steering group with the express purpose that members represent all main research areas of each panel. The panellists evaluate proposed publication channels (both journals and book publishers) and rank them into one of four levels. All publication channels that have been evaluated are at least level 0, but this lowest rank includes publications that do not fulfil the criteria set for peer review and independence from departmental interests, and also includes predatory publishers. Level 1 requires that the panellists can assert that peer-review takes place, that the publication channel has an editorial board of experts in the field that the publication covers with over 50% of this board or the authors coming from outside the publisher’s own research organisation, and that the publication has a degree of longevity (i.e. it has been in existence for longer than one year with more than two issues). Levels 2 and 3 are marks of excellence, limited to those channels that the panel considers most significant in the fields they represent, meaning that at least 75% of the publication volume of all channels allocated to a given panel are on levels 0 and 1. In the Humanities and Social Sciences, level 2 also includes channels that mainly publish in Finnish or Swedish but which are considered important for national discourse.
Using the tools on the trilingual (Finnish, Swedish, and English) website, anyone can check the current ranking of a publication in the system and propose both new publication channels and changes in the ranking of particular publication channels. However, speaking as the former vice chair (2014–2021) and chair (2018–2021) of Panel 22 of the Publication Forum, relatively few such suggestions are made, despite the number of scholars seen using the system to search information about publishers or referencing it in public and the visibility of the system in university administration.
Although the Publication Forum seeks to help academics find channels in which to publish their research, ranking publications not only by international indexes but also by how scholars in each field valued publication in particular fora. It is also, primarily, a tool for the Ministry of Education to allocate state funding to research institutions (between 2021-2024, 14% of the basic funding of universities in Finland is allocated based on publications, calculated in three-year averages – see https://julkaisufoorumi.fi/en/faq-0). From the outset, the Publication Forum instructions have strictly forbidden evaluation of individual scholars or even entire departments based on the rankings of their publications, as the ranking system has had a major impact on academic discourse and evaluation of applicants to academic positions as well as on where scholars choose to publish.
In Finland, most journals are published by learned societies running on volunteer labour and membership fees that should also cover other activities. In smaller fields with a smaller pool of experts, even without the highest Publication Forum ranking, finding peer reviewers has become increasingly difficult, which slows down the publishing of research. Academic institutions, research funders, and the Ministry of Education do not consider service to the field as a merit, meaning reviewing manuscripts is of low priority for scholars pressed for time.
Another quirk of the Finnish system is, that university presses are generally ranked 0 in the Publication Forum because most series published by such presses do not have editorial boards with 50% of board members – let alone authors – from outside of the institution. Instead, the highest ranked publishers are commercial publishers that publish non-fiction, often both peer-reviewed scholarship and more popular volumes, including translations. Given the price of printing and postage, many academic journals have moved to online-only publication, but book publishers still get much of their income from print. Over the past decade, all book sales in Finland have been falling, even with e-publication making publications increasingly accessible, and the current right-wing government’s decision to raise the taxation on all literature has only steepened the downward trend. Although non-fiction is still 40% of the market, between 2019-2025, the sales of Finnish language non-fiction have fallen by over 25%. This means that to cover the costs of publication, commercial publishers of peer-reviewed books have begun to demand collateral from authors.
To give a concrete example, in 2019, I began searching for a publisher for the last anthology of the four-year Academy of Finland (Research Council of Finland) research project How to Do Things with Performance? (https://www.uniarts.fi/en/projects/how-to-do-things-with-performance/; https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/281037/281038; https://howtodothingswithperformance.wordpress.com/) The project sought to combine the methods and processes of Performance Studies and Artistic Research, and one of the stated aims was also to publish in Finnish where scholarship in Performance Studies is almost entirely doctoral theses, which are not considered peer reviewed research. The final book was thus to be in Finnish, requiring a publisher willing to take a chance with a somewhat marginal research area.
The easiest option would have been to publish the book in the Theatre Academy publication series, Acta Scenica (https://actascenica.teak.fi/). However, throughout the project, we had received significant support from Uniarts Helsinki as the research project funding was gravely insufficient – in addition to our Primary Investigator, Annette Arlander, not receiving any funding from the Academy of Finland, our two junior researcher positions for Tero Nauha and Pilvi Porkola and my own senior researcher position were all on less than 50% positions. We all worked in various temporary positions at Uniarts Helsinki and other research institutions throughout the project, but the university allowed us to supplement our travel allocation from institutional overheads that also paid for the salary of a part-time research co-ordinator, whose help with arranging our research events was invaluable.
Even with peer review process in place, the Publication Forum ranking system would have meant that the Acta Scenica series would only count as level 0, meaning considerably less money for the publication would come from the Ministry of Education than if we were publishing outside this institution. (With an anthology of nine texts, a Publication Forum ranking of 0 would only have brought the equivalent of 0.9 points for the university and a level 1 publication would bring in 9. But level 2 has a higher coefficient, meaning such a publication would bring in 27 points.) More importantly, however, the prestige of publishing with a commercial publisher is much higher than publishing with a university press, meaning the authors’ CVs would receive more of a boost from such a publication.
The first two publishers I contacted were not interested in the proposal, citing the likelihood of small readership that, from their perspective, equates to small sales and a reduced chance of profit. The pandemic and issues with my health placed the project on hold until, in 2021, with the project’s pandemic extension running out, I finally contacted Vastapaino, a publisher mostly focusing on Social Sciences in Tampere, Finland. They cited the same concerns as other publishers but were interested in taking us on, provided the book manuscript passed peer review. Given our project funding was running out in August 2021, we used what remained of our funds to pay an advance to a trusted language expert to read and correct the grammar of our manuscript to make a better impression on the peer reviewers.
The first peer reviews came in December 2021 and were generally positive, but also made considerable requests for changes, notably a whole new chapter on a topic related to pedagogy of performance during the pandemic and a new introduction, including an explanation of planned visual parts. The publisher’s representatives also wanted a rewriting of the introduction, removing all references to the Academy of Finland project, changing the annotation system, and, somewhat alarmingly, an agreement of some kind of collateral funding on our part. Since the Academy of Finland funding had ended, we were not willing to pay to the publisher out of pocket without a contract for publication, something they were unwilling to provide before a full manuscript and a second round of peer review. Fortunately, the end of fiscal year is the best time to ask for additional money from universities, and I managed to negotiate 2500€ from my department and 2500€ from the Publication Committee of the Theatre Academy, a funding body that requires that a department support any application. Here, the fact that the university would eventually recover at least some of these funds from the Ministry of Education was perhaps less important than having publications from our scholars reach audiences who might not otherwise encounter them.
The additional funding from Uniarts Helsinki covered the minimum requirement by the publisher, essentially securing the publication already prior to the second round of peer reviews. In exchange, the university would receive a number of copies of the book that it could sell at a price of their choosing. For us, this condition was important because it meant we could, if we so wished, sell the book with a student or faculty discount – or even give it out for free. However, the rewriting and second peer review took over four months longer than promised, and we finally received requests for corrections in November 2023 from the same reviewers. They were more positive and had relatively minor suggestions except for edits to the new, pedagogy text and further clarifications to the introduction for audiences not familiar with Performance Studies or Artistic Research. The role of the visual parts that included one of our programme handouts, a recipe as an example of an everyday score, images from video works discussed in the texts, and illustrations still required more clarification as images are not commonly given this kind of valence in academic scholarship.
From the final submission of the manuscript to actual physical copies of the book took an additional ten months. The layout of the cover first gave all of us as editors instead of just me, and this erroneous cover later haunted the first promotion materials as well. In press, the publisher noticed the book lacked the peer review label that the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies introduced in 2014 to indicate which contributions in an anthology or books by a commercial publisher had actually passed a peer review process (https://www.tsv.fi/en/services/label-for-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications).
With concrete books in hand, yet another hurdle emerged. In addition to the publisher’s own channels, the copies of the book secured by the advance given to the publisher were to be sold via a joint enterprise by the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and Uniarts Helsinki, Unicontent. Only months after the publication of the book, this online shop was discontinued and we were notified that our new distributor would only sell books published by Uniarts Helsinki. As a book published by Vastapaino, the bookshop would not include this book in its catalogue. Since the money was long since spent and physical copies were taking up storage space, we were told to give out copies for free.
For the university, the book would pay for itself – and more. Even with the inflation of the monetary value of points in the Ministry of Education allocation (as state funds do not increase but publication numbers do), according to our information specialist’s calculations, in 2024, the difference between level 0 and level 2 translated to about 100,000€ more money for the university. Even with no sales of books via Unicontent, this was a very good return for a 5000€ investment.
In comparison with my experiences with English language publishers (currently, I am one of the editors for a Bloomsbury Methuen book series), the publication process in Finnish was much more arduous and made me understand why so many of my colleagues in Artistic Research choose to publish in the Publication Forum level 0 departmental series. Not only is it much faster, with fewer considerations given to potential audiences beyond the Arts, but also the visual and stylistic aspects of publishing Artistic Research are easier to negotiate with people who often themselves come from Arts backgrounds and have an appreciation of these aspects of scholarship. At the same time, my English language monograph certainly has more weight in my CV than the eight Finnish language anthologies and textbooks I have edited combined.
The crisis in non-fiction publishing in Finland does mean that authors need to secure additional support from institutions or funding bodies to publish their scholarship. However, large English language publishing houses are no less demanding – negotiating and paying for image rights, language editing, indexing, and other aspects of the publication process explicitly required by the publishers are often left to the author(s). Open Access publication, increasingly stipulated by funding bodies as obligatory, is, for authors, an additional expense that needs to be budgeted already at the application phase of research when the actual research is yet to be done. Altogether, these are impossible demands, especially as younger scholars are increasingly living precarious lives, moving between countries after short-term research posts or other jobs; while more senior scholars receive funding decisions that do not actually cover the salaries of scholars let alone conference travel or publication costs.
In Finland, the Publication Forum system may have directed scholars to consider where they publish with more care, but the rankings invite misuse, as most scholars cannot fathom the requirement of such a ranking to operate only with statistically significant sample sizes, such as those of entire universities over several years. In the current climate of constant competition, it is very human to gripe about why a scholar with so few level 3 publications is awarded funding or a coveted position, but the output of a single person is simply not what the system is designed to measure. In the Arts, and especially in Artistic Research, I would say it is past time to work strategically within such systems: reconsider publication as local content first, including fostering aesthetics of publications and publishing in multiple languages, and to write these visions into funding and policy documents. Collaborative projects, especially interdisciplinary and truly international ones, are important not only for the reach of the field but for sustainability of participating scholars’ livelihoods, local practices, and truly international futures for the field. Here, perhaps, speaking and writing in multiple languages might offer an avenue out of the hegemonic. Yet, multiple languages – like quality design – usually increases publishing costs. In neoliberal institutions, scholars thus also need to be thinking strategically about who to approach and how to elucidate the concrete monetary value of their publications for the employer. Being more aware of how research figures in universities’ finances, means being able to push for the kind of concrete support for publications that allow for artistic research’s aesthetic goals.
Biography
Dr Hanna Järvinen works as University Lecturer at the University of the Arts Helsinki's Research Institute and at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the Theatre Academy, and holds the title of Docent in Dance History at the University of Turku, Finland. The author of Dancing Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and eight anthologies as well as a number of articles and book chapters, her research combines dance scholarship with performance studies, history, cultural studies, and artistic research. In particular, she has been interested in authorship and canonisation, postcolonialism and decolonisation, and questions of materiality and contemporaneity in art practice. She is the co-convenor of the Choreography and Corporeality working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and the History working group of the Nordic Forum for Dance Research.
