Spanish versus English in Scholarly Communication: is Spanish still a Healthy Language?

Abstract

This article analyzes the vitality of Spanish as a means of scientific-academic communication, which is currently losing ground due to the increasing prestige of publishing in English. As a result, Spanish-speaking and in general non-Anglophone scholars are potentially placed at a disadvantage, since in order to have their research published, they are required to make the extra effort of publishing in a foreign language; hence, they face the risk of failure for reasons other than the quality of their research. A solution to this inequality might be an increased tolerance of publishing brokers towards either language errors in texts and/or argumentative-rhetorical patterns belonging to non- nglophone writing cultures. Another alternative could be furthering open access journals, which allow bypassing the strict selection of bibliometric indexes, which is overly biased in favor of publications written in English.