In a letter published in The Duty in November 2023, I concluded my remarks by saying that “we had to be ambitious and roll up our sleeves so that science in French, from here and elsewhere, stands out more in the digital world and enriches us in our daily activities.” A letter that had been published on the sidelines of the World Francophonie Science Week, organized by the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie and held in Quebec City. It was as part of this Week that the Quebec Declaration on the promotion of scientific publications in French was endorsed, more precisely during the holding of the 7e Conference of Ministers of Higher Education and Research of the French-speaking world, chaired by the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry.
This Declaration is intended to be “a call to action to promote concerted actions in the area of scientific research and publications in French.” A few months earlier, the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) held the international forum La science en français au Québec et dans le monde, with a stance that was not hostile to English, but open to linguistic diversity in science. All of this was done against the backdrop of robust bibliometric data, which demonstrate that the share of publications in English worldwide increased from 64% in 1995 to over 90% in 2019, while the proportion of articles published in French decreased from just under 10% to 1% (Larivière and Gaudreault-Desbiens, 2022).
A spring of announcements
The FRQ and its partners have in fact rolled up their sleeves to give themselves a capacity for research and action in terms of publication, accessibility and discoverability of scientific content in French.
First, the FRQ announced the creation of the Quebec Research and Sharing Network for Scientific Journals, with a budget of $10 million over five years, headed by Professor Francis Gingras of the University of Montreal. This Network, which already has 120 research and collaborator members, will promote support for free and immediate open access to scientific publications and the sharing of publishing and dissemination services, from which Quebec journals will benefit. This Network should thus address the lack of resources and expertise to meet the challenges of open access and eventually open science.
This Network is associated with one of the three new Quebec Research Chairs, the one on the discoverability of scientific content in French, announced by the Minister of Higher Education. The work of the Chair, co-directed by professors Vincent Larivière, of the Université de Montréal, and Marie-Jean Meurs, of the Université du Québec à Montréal, will provide a better understanding of the use of French in research in Quebec and elsewhere in the world, and explore avenues to increase scientific production and its discoverability.
In addition to the work of the Chair, the Ministry of the French Language and the FRQ announced support for a research team, also led by Vincent Larivière, whose mandate is more limited to scientific publications and their discoverability. Based on an analysis of the situation, the team will have the mandate, among other things, to propose ways to increase the number of French-language publications produced in Quebec, to better promote them and to make them more accessible and discoverable.
The research team will also support the Franco-Quebec partnership on the discoverability of scientific content in French, the announcement of which, made at the Université du Québec en Outaouais during the Acfas congress, follows the joint declaration of the Quebec and French prime ministers during the 21e Alternate meeting of prime ministers, held last April. This partnership focuses on the production and dissemination of French-language scientific content, translation to promote linguistic diversity, the commitment of higher education institutions to science in French and the conditions for the emergence of a French-language scientific digital space. I have the honour of co-chairing the scientific committee of this project on Quebec-France discoverability, with Professor Étienne Ghys, permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences.
For the FRQ, these spring announcements are part of the suite of initiatives undertaken since 2021, namely the expansion and improvement of its financial support for some sixty scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities sector, as well as the Érudit journal platform; the launch of the Publication en français competition; its membership in cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding organizations that aims, with its Plan S, to make complete and immediate open access a reality; the updating of its Open Access Dissemination Policy in light of the requirements of Plan S; its membership in the Coalition for the Advancement of Research Assessment (CoARA) aimed at better recognizing the various results, practices and activities that maximize the quality and impact of research; and the creation of the Réseau international francophone en conseil scientifique, a member of the Réseau international en conseil scientifique gouvernemental (INGSA). Professor Matthieu Ouimet of Université Laval is its director.
The Summit of the International Organization of La Francophonie, which will be held on October 4 and 5 in Villers-Cotterêts and Paris, will be a great opportunity to promote Quebec-France collaboration on science and its discoverability in French. Ultimately, science must reach a wide audience because that is its role as the ultimate funder of public research. We are betting that a greater offer, accessibility and discoverability of scientific content in French will contribute to better scientific literacy among our French-speaking and Francotropic fellow citizens.