I am a native English speaker, so I have a certain perspective.  I am certainly sympathetic to the challenges faced by native speakers of other languages.

I HOPE that the challenge is not about "ideas that are not in the mainstream of Anglo-American theories."  Reviewers should be more flexible than that.   

When I review papers, the main challenge seems to be writing academic English, which requires a fairly high proficiency level.  As a reviewer I often remind myself that there are different "world Englishes" and that the usage does not need to be a perfect American or British usage, as long as it is understandable. 

While this does not seem fair, I honestly do not anticipate that the system will be changing soon.  

I recommend reading English as a Global Language by Crystal

I am a native English speaker, so I have a certain perspective.  I am certainly sympathetic to the challenges faced by native speakers of other languages.

I HOPE that the challenge is not about "ideas that are not in the mainstream of Anglo-American theories."  Reviewers should be more flexible than that.   

When I review papers, the main challenge seems to be writing academic English, which requires a fairly high proficiency level.  As a reviewer I often remind myself that there are different "world Englishes" and that the usage does not need to be a perfect American or British usage, as long as it is understandable. 

While this does not seem fair, I honestly do not anticipate that the system will be changing soon.  

It depends on how we look at it. We can always translate the language used to English and get proofreaders to edit your work. When I review papers, if the manuscript needs editing, I make a remark that grammar editing is needed.

I guess not. How could I read research papers from the scholars of different countries if there was no global language? Professor Marek is right. Thank you professor for your excellent answer.

Should not we maintain one way collaboration system? Professor Michael W. Marek's statements are really appreciated.   

I have a colleague who spent time during his Masters-level work helping Chinese students at his university translate their earlier work into English.  Early on this consisted of putting their papers into Google Translate and then working to make that output more readable.  By the time he left school, Google's service had made remarkable improvements -- to the point where almost no further editing was needed.  This is getting to be a magnificent service and I would almost people to write in the language with which they are most comfortable, then use Google.

One of my standard review comments, when it is clear that the authors are not native English speakers. is that you should have a native English speaker as an editor.  Have them read the paper aloud and make your grammatical edits based on how awkward it sounds.

There is no doubt that English is the language of science and the fact that we have a language in which researchers across the world can communicate and share ideas is a necessary component of scientific advancement.

At the same time, teaching scientific English to non-native speakers I see how much my brilliant students have trouble expressing their ideas in a language that is not their own.  So I would say that non-native speakers do have an extra work-load that native speakers do in that non-natives either need to master scientific writing skills or appropriate the necessary funds to afford translation or proofreading services.  

However I would not say that the dominance of English damages research as having a common language allows us to share the results of our toils regardless of our first languages or country of origin. 

I appreciate all the comments very much. I agree with all of them. I understand that a common language is needed to spread science. But I am thinking in the repercussions that this have, being the common language English, French, Latin or whatever language.

To publish a scientist paper you do not only need to write in English, but to write in very good English. Writing well in a language is difficult even for a native speaker. Not everyone can write well in a language, nor can anyone work in a scientist text. I agree with the fact that it is indispensable to account with professional proofreading services and very specialized native speakers.

I was talking recently with a colleague of an Argentinian University about this and he told me that is difficult to do so in many developing countries. The price for translating a standard paper is around 800 US$ and to check it the first time if it is written in English around 350 US$. Most of the papers need a second round revision and explanations to the reviewers. This increases the costs. I am thinking in Social Sciences, which is my field. You can imagine what all this mean in terms of budget for researchers in developing countries.

Let say that any of us is working in 2 articles each year, you have to spend an important part of your salary in a developing country to proofread them. And do not even think in ask for money to your Faculty. I am afraid this can be a strong barrier, impassable many times.

This is an extremely valid point and an issue that should be addressed. Not only does it put non-native speakers in developing countries at a disadvantage but given this tremendous hurdle, it puts the entire scientific community at a disadvantage since it means that important research being done in these countries may not spread as readily.  Ideally nonprofit organizations should exist that offer free language services to such research groups in order to support the global advancement of scientific discovery. 

Definitivamente, el problema es que todos aquí han dado una respuesta en ese idioma, sean o no de un país angloparlante. Incluso, la pregunta se planteó en ese idioma. The best solution in the short term is write our papers in this global language. 

Buenos días  Isaac,

Vivo ahora en Alemania, per soy de El Paso y por eso estoy muy interesado en saber como los estudiantes en Juárez ven el uso del inglés para su publicaciónes  científicas. Sé que muchos de los profesores en el paso en utep, por ejemplo,  esperaban que todos los estudiantes tuvieran proficiencia en español ya que la mayoría de los estudiantes y profesores eran hablantes nativos de español o bilingual. ¿cree usted que inglés juega una papel más grande en Juárez similar a que español juega un papel más grande en utep que otras universidades americanas? 

What lessons can be learned from the bilingual nature of ciudades fronterizas? 

I can also recommend:

Academic Discourse: English in a Global Context

Ken Hyland, Continuum, London, 2009, 215 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8264-9804-5,

Thank you, Carmen. I will take a look, for sure.

Also interesting to ask the extra challenges for researchers whose native language is not English and the difficulties they face to access high impact journals... From my experience (as both author and reviewer) I can say that, when a certain level  is reached in very specialized research (at least in fields like linguistics, philosophy... ), there are no translators who can help. In other words, if researchers are proficient in English language their publications will be accepted (provided content is relevant, of course) and if not, they usually struggle and have their papers rejected by journal reviewers.

I agree with you, Carmen. A good knowledge of English is not enough to publishing in top journals.You need the help of a native speaker. In addition, once a certain level is reached, it is very difficult to find a qualified translator. And, if so, you have to be ready to pay a lot. 

Well, this is not exactly what I mean...

i know of several colleagues in my field who never ask  a native speaker. I never do either. But it is a big challenge to reach this stage:) Hard work indeed! Native speakers can invest all their energies in their content fields and we have to invest a lot of effort in learning English too. 

But you have studied and teach modern languages. It is your field.

And there are so many fields that require specialization within the field of languages: pragmatics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics... and each of them is further subdivided and can get more specific: critical discourse analysis, systemic functional discourse analysis...

According to McWhorter (2015): 90% of the 6000 languages that currently exist on the planet will disappear. This is mainly due to globalization, migration, the increase of world tourism, the growing willingness to learn other languages.

Of course, English will survive, but it is obvious that there are scientific contributions in other languages that can not be ignored, quite the opposite.

Certainly bilingual or multilingual scientists have more immediacy to process information in relation to those that are not.

There are other analyzes on page 107 of the next chapter:

Chapter Quality of life and education in the knowledge society

I think so.

Regards

Using one language in publishing science is good. All researchers in different countries need to know only one language. If using more than one language in publishing, it would be very difficult to learn more languages to follow the scientific topics.