An international scientific journal has linked directly to the Catalan translation of an abstract and informative summary of an article published in its pages for the first time. The article is a study by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), published in Nature Communications, which describes a new scientific methodology for identifying and characterising genes, and which has chosen to publish the abstract and the informative summary of the article in Catalan. The aim of this initiative is twofold: to bring science and scientific language to a non-specialist audience and in turn, to contribute to linguistic diversity in scientific publications where English is the predominant language.

The Catalan Minister for Research and Universities, Joaquim Nadal i Farreras, stressed that “the initiative by the CRG is fully consistent with the open science strategy promoted by the Catalan Science Act in order to improve the social impact of research and make it more accessible to the public”. And from a national perspective, science being expressed in Catalonia’s language “makes perfect sense”.

International scientific journals usually publish articles and the accompanying referenced abstracts and informative summaries in English. However, the CRG is a pioneer in including Catalan in the linked abstract and informative summary in the publication, and it has done so for several reasons. The researchers leading the study, Roderic Guigó Serra and Sílvia Carbonell Sala, believe that using Catalan “makes the content of a study funded with public funds more accessible to society,” as the CRG is a CERCA centre. Likewise, publishing scientific articles in Catalan “is vital for enriching the terminology of each place’s languages” and to fight against the linguistic impoverishment caused by the monopoly of a single language in the scientific realm.

According to Marina Massaguer Comes, language policy advisor at the Catalan Ministry for Research and Universities, initiatives like this one “aim to ensure Catalan is present in the research field, and for this reason we have produced the guide to management of multilingualism at Catalan research centres, aimed at promoting Catalan and thereby contributing to global linguistic diversity in science”.