Publish (in English) or Perish: Greek Academia and the Imposition of English Language

The framework of Greek universities and research institutes, derived from state legislation, promotes foreign language publications in order for researchers and academics to be employed or receive funding. I argue that adopting this Western colonial gaze of the supremacy of foreign-language in respect to Greek-language publishing has a very negative impact both on researchers and on academics, who often do not have the necessary means to publish in foreign languages, but also on science – especially in the arts and humanities and social sciences – and on society. Motives for research and publishing shift from that being useful to (other) researchers, students or society to that being lucrative for potential publishers. The growing precarity in Greek academia is further nurturing the fetishization of metrics. While the latter is now being acknowledged, it is not countered by a critique of meritocracy and metricsocracy but by creating local metrics and indexing systems. I argue that this is far from being the solution and that multilingual open access publishing can potentially serve the internationalisation of research without the latter losing its educative role on a local academic and societal level.