English-Medium Journals in Serbia: Editors' Perspectives

The dominant position of English in international scholarship and increasing pressures on scholars worldwide to publish in English are now well documented (for example, Belcher 2007, Buckingham 2014, Canagarajah 2002, Curry and Lillis 2004, Ferguson et al. 2011, Flowerdew 1999a, 1999b, 2000, Hamel 2007,Hanauer and Englander 2013, Lillis and Curry 2006, 2010, Uzuner 2008). One of the less-explored consequences of this trend is the growth of English-medium journals in non-Anglophone countries. While the extent of Anglicization of periodicals varies across countries and disciplinary areas, with the hard sciences more prone to Anglicization than the humanities, this trend seems to be pervasive and ongoing (see, for instance, Gibbs 1995, Lillis 2012, Lillis and Curry 2010, Pérez-Llantada et al. 2011, Swales 1997). As English-medium journals are on the rise, those in local languages seem to be disappearing from the scene, as scholars increasingly publish in English rather than in their local languages. For instance, between 1999 and 2006, the numbers of papers in Spanish-language journals published in Spain decreased by half (Pérez-Llantada et al. 2011); similarly, the proportion of medical publications in Italian in the PubMed database fell by 60 per cent between 1986 and 2005, showing ‘the gradual peripheralization of Italian’ as the language of medical science (Giannoni 2008, p. 105). Giannoni (2008) also cites data showing that the entire output of Italian researchers in some areas (mathematics, food quality, chemistry) is now published in English, either in international journals or in Italian English-medium journals. As Moreno (2013) half-jokingly stated in a recent conference presentation commenting on the situation in Spain, discourse analysts must act fast if they wish to collect academic papers in local languages while they still exist, especially in hard science and technological areas