COAR (the Confederation of Open Access Repositories) is calling for your feedback on draft recommendations for depositing, managing, and curating multilingual and non-English language content in repositories.

The 16 draft recommendations were developed by a COAR Task Force, chaired by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager. The recommendations aim to provide good practice advice on depositing, managing and curating multilingual and non-English language content in repositories.

Multilingualism is a critical characteristic of a healthy, inclusive, and diverse research communications landscape. Publishing in a local language ensures that people in different countries have access to the research they fund, and also levels the playing field for researchers who speak different languages. 

However, multilingualism presents a particular challenge for the discovery of research outputs. Although researchers and other information seekers may only be able to read in one or two languages, they want to know about all the relevant work in their research area, regardless of the language in which it is published. 

The recommendations define good practices for metadata, multilingual keywords, user interfaces, translations, formats, licenses, and indexing that will improve the visibility and discovery of repository content in a variety of languages, along with implementation guidance for the repository community.

Read the recommendations and provide your input.

The public consultation will be open for input until 30 June 2023