[okfn-discuss] Open Science Tranlsations

[Patrick Primate]

Hello, my name is Patrick Welch. I am a masters student in Clinical
Psychology at the University of Regina. I'm curious if anyone has
heard of any open science / open knowledge service or effort to
translate journal articles and other research to other languages? I am
a native English speaker, and English is said to be the dominant
language of science, but much of the English knowledge and research is
unavailable to the non-English speaking world. Just as importantly,
research and articles published in non-English languages are
unavailable to the English speaking world. This is a large barrier for
open science / open knowledge for a number of obvious reasons.

I can imagine a blissful scenario in which one has a choice of
language when one downloads an article or some other research. Of
course this may be improbable to do 'Officially' (the original authors
may not be able to translate directly into other languages and
publishers may not be able to afford the translation costs). But
perhaps some sort of collaborate open science / open knowledge
endeavor could produce 'unofficial' or 'quasi-official' translations.
This could be done in a number of ways (e.g., a wiki-like system for
collaborative editing/translating, with an export to pdf/odt/etc..for
download).

Although this issue may become easier to deal with as more 'free'
forms of open access come to dominate (something that certainly will
take some time) in the current atmosphere I don't know if we would be
legally allowed to do this. Does anyone know if the publishers would
sue if we start collaboratively translating articles? Has anyone heard
of any projects like this?

Any feedback will be appreciated :)

Thank you very much,

Patrick Welch