The foundational meeting of the Council of Editors of Translation and Interpreting Studies for Open Science (the Open Council) took place on January 21 and 22, 2021. The 32 foundational members of the Open Council are different in nature, but they all come under the umbrella of open access: diamond open-access journals, book series, an encyclopaedia, and bibliographic databases. The Open Council aims to meet the need for a platform to bridge information and initiatives among the platforms promoting open access in Translation and Interpreting Studies.
The Open Council promotes open access—in particular, diamond open access—but also other practices within open science, such as open data, open methods and tools, open peer-review, and open research evaluation (Pontika et al. 2015). It is rather difficult to quantify to what extent such practices have been implemented in Translation and Interpreting Studies.
For instance, our discipline does not have a specific repository for open data sharing. Open datasets are spread across multiple repositories, whether public (like Figshare or Zenodo), institutional (including those of the authors' universities) or private (such as Researchgate). Datasets can also be appended as supplementary materials to research outputs and hosted on the websites of the publishing venue, or data repositories can be created for specific studies. This makes it difficult to determine how open Translation and Interpreting Studies is regarding data sharing.
Open peer-review is another case in point. So far, no journal in our discipline has implemented any of the many practices of open peer-review, e.g., open identities, open reports, open interaction, pre-review manuscripts, open final-version commenting, and open platforms (Ross-Hellauer 2017). The Open Council is aware that promoting and sharing open-science practices would certainly be unwise without a careful analysis of the potential benefits and drawbacks of such practices and the specific challenges to their implementation in our discipline. Consequently, the Open Council has created working groups to explore the ways these practices can be better applied in our field.
The Open Council also aims to coordinate initiatives to ensure publishing quality, in line with open science standards and goals. Accordingly, the Open Council has launched three working groups that are exploring issues linked to publishing quality with a view to establishing recommendations and best practices in the near future. Specifically, work is underway on quality metrics, on publishing ethics and policies, and on drafting common style guidelines, including a list of common abbreviations and acronyms.
The Open Council is not a closed network, and we wish to be as open a platform as possible, while preserving a set of common features that bring us together. Applications for membership are welcome from initiatives related to open access and publishing, such as bibliographic databases, journals, book series publishers, and encyclopaedias; The main focus of the candidates needs to fall on Translation and Interpreting Studies; they further need to grant diamond open, permanent and free access to published scientific works immediately upon publication, and they should have had substantial activity in the last two years.
The current 32 members are:
The next meeting of the Open Council will be held at the University of Bologna (Italy) in the first term of 2022 and will feature an international symposium on open science in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Our website and social media platforms will be ready very soon. Stay tuned and contact us if you wish more information on how to become a member!
References
Pontika, Nancy, Knoth, Petr, Cancellieri, Matteo and Pearce, Samuel. 2015. “Fostering open science to research using a taxonomy and an eLearning portal”. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business - i-KNOW ’15, 21-22-Octo:1–8. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2809563.2809571.
Ross-Hellauer, Tony. 2017. “What Is open peer review? A systematic review.” F1000Research 6 (1): 588. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1.
This news item was originally published in the May 2021 issue of the EST Newsletter (pp. 14-15).
