Linguistic equity as open access: Internationalizing the language of scholarly communication.

The open access movement has called attention to ways in which financial barriers to participation in scholarly discourse inhibit the growth of knowledge and perpetuate global inequities. The majority of the focus, however, has lain upon two kinds of direct financial barrier: subscription fees and article processing charges. This article proposes that the use of English as the lingua franca of modern scholarly communication constitutes a 'hidden paywall' that counterproductively inhibits the participation of scholars from many parts of the world and particularly from the global south. After a brief review of the costs of this 'hidden paywall' and of the tradition of 'great power' linguae francae in which English now stands, this article suggests that 19th and 20th century proposals for the use of a constructed auxiliary language as an aid to global scholarship now deserve to be revisited, with contemporary developments in publishing technology and machine translation rendering them feasible alternatives to the status quo in ways that they were not when first introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]