It all started with a discussion on AI — yes or no? Is it a passing fad? Then came the downpour of tools to explore — tools to make the researcher’s work more efficient, to support journal publication workflows, tools to recommend journals, tools to detect plagiarism. AI is helping researchers write better, analyze data faster and uncover insights that may have taken months otherwise. It is indeed an exciting time — open data, preprints, crowdsourced research, open peer reviews, and collaborative platforms are all transforming how we share knowledge today. It’s as if the wagon of disruption hasn’t stopped even once; while this momentum is truly powerful it makes me wonder: are we keeping up with the change? Or just being carried along with it?

Then, of course, in the wake of these disruptions, new problems keep emerging — ethical issues, retractions, authorship concerns, and more. Are we feeling more efficient today or are simply out of breath trying to keep up with what’s changing? If we are evolving daily, why do so many still feel unheard?

Is it because we keep disrupting, innovating, getting excited and then disappointed? Each new change promises to make research fairer, faster, more transparent. Yet, in many cases, researchers, especially from under resourced countries or from countries where English is not the first language, face added pressure to catch up, rather than to move forward.

Imagine a race to the finish line — are some entering this race with uneven starting lines? Won’t this eventually lead to fatigue, not empowerment and progress? Are the communities that open science was meant to serve feeling like participants? Or are they starting to feel like spectators?

Could it be that while we are building pathways for sharing knowledge, we aren’t doing the same for understanding it? We have made significant strides in making research open but much of that progress is designed for people who speak one language — English. Journal articles and data sets remain inaccessible to those who think, teach, or solve problems in a language other than English. Ironic isn’t it? Some of the world’s most innovative research is coming from countries where English is not the first language. Are we forcing these regions to publish in English just for international visibility?

Let’s take China as an example. In 2023, Chinese researchers contributed nearly 730,000 SCI-indexed papers, which amounts to almost one-third of the global total. However, only about 33,400 of those were published in China’s own SCI journals, less than 5% of the total output from Chinese researchers. It’s worth considering whether the authors who published in English language journals were truly comfortable with the process, or if they felt pressured to do so.

It’s not just the non-English speaking authors who suffer. Globally also, authors lose out on great perspectives and insights because insights published in local regional language journals are not accessible to them. That means the rest of the world is missing out on a vast body of high-quality research simply because of language. How can this knowledge be made more accessible? How do we build systems that translate, contextualize, or connect it, so that openness truly extends beyond borders and languages?

What can we do so that openness feels like a movement by researchers rather than something that is being done to them?

 Have you paid attention to the fact that for open access content and discovery platforms, English is the default language to the extent that even search algorithms favor English terms and global repositories often index work that is not in English poorly or not at all? Vast stores of knowledge in Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and hundreds of other languages stay hidden. It is no wonder then that researchers don’t feel incentivized to publish in their local language because they run the risk of their work remaining uncited, under-discovered, and undervalued and not because it lacks rigor, but because it lacks visibility.

This imbalance silently recreates the same hierarchies that open access was meant to dismantle in the first place. We’ve opened the gates, yes, but let’s ask ourselves honestly if these gates are open only for those who speak the right language.

I feel that the issue is that we are looking at multilingualism as an add-on to openness — a good to have where it should be a must have. Some regions already lead the way. SciELO in Latin America and AmeliCA across the Global South have shown that local-language publishing can coexist with global visibility, challenging the assumption that “international” automatically means “English.”

UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science also urges nations to support multilingual dissemination as a design principle: “to ensure that scientific collaborations transcend the boundaries of geography, language and resources, and include knowledge from marginalized communities to solve problems of great social importance.”

I think this is great because listening in every language changes what is possible, allowing the one-way broadcast to become a dialogue. On the ground, we are already seeing some changes; researchers translating abstracts, sharing bilingual summaries on social media, and recording short videos in their local languages. These are small but powerful acts of listening and it’s so heartening to see.

This I believe strongly will have far-reaching impact. Policymakers will be able to act on findings that they are finally able to understand; communities will see their own realities reflected in evidence, and there will be more cross border collaborations. Technology will have a part to play, of course. AI-powered translation tools, science dissemination or visual summary tools, and more will go a long way to support this. Yes, there is a risk of meaning getting lost in translation, but I am really rooting for a future that is culturally fluent and an ecosystem that doesn’t just open doors but invites people in.

I think we all know the problems, but the pace of disruption doesn’t allow us to pause and take measured steps in the right direction. We need slower more deliberate openness and these changes should be made by involving more people in the change. Should funders start incentivizing multilingual outputs? Should journals publish bilingual abstracts? How can we listen more? Include more?

Disruption has brought us this far. We have opened up doors to knowledge, yet left many people unheard. How can we focus less on loud technologies and more on quiet listening? How can we turn disruption into belonging?