Language barriers --- financial barriers

[Simon Brodbeck]

On Friday 6 March 2009, Jean-Luc Chevillard wrote: "The more languages one 
knows, the better."

Few would disagree. But that is from the perspective of the consumer or 
recipient of texts. Active researchers are also producers of texts, and must 
produce them in one language or another. From this perspective, one's work 
will be inaccessible to those who lack facility with the language in which 
it is presented; and the choice of language is therefore a choice of 
audience.

On the issue of financial barriers, it is an ongoing source of embarrassment 
and bemusement to myself and many of my contemporaries that the journals and 
publishers we have been led to believe are most highly esteemed by our 
institutional elders (in whose hands our careers lie) tend to be those which 
most of our desired audience cannot access. One cannot but suppose that, as 
a result, most of the discourse that there is on indological subjects occurs 
in contexts systematically ignorant of certain recent discoveries in 
indology.

The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council has been funding a higher and 
higher fraction of British indological research in recent years. My 
perception is that the AHRC are increasingly concerned to ensure that the 
projects they fund have outputs accessible beyond the university sector. 
Perhaps, then, pretty soon, projects whose principal written outputs are not 
to be made freely available online will simply not be publicly funded.

Simon Brodbeck
Cardiff University