International Labour Review inspires innovations in multilingual publishing at the OLH
Posted by Dr Katherine Parker-Hay on 16 April 2025
In March 2024, the OLH accepted an application from the International Labour Review (ILR), who have moved from legacy publisher Wiley and relaunched as a diamond open access journal with the OLH in April 2025. In this article, the OLH’s User Experience Researcher and Content Strategist Dr Katherine Parker-Hay interviews the ILR’s editorial team to explore the journal’s unique basis in the Treaty of Versailles and the importance of open access for research on work and employment. As the journal moves to the OLH and publishes its first diamond open access issue this March 2025, Katherine reflects on the significance of the bespoke development work that the OLH will undertake to support its multilingual publishing.
A unique history
The ILR is owned by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which originated in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The founders of the ILO were convinced that there was an essential link between social justice within countries and international peace, and that this link was so strong and significant as to make it indispensable that an organization to deal with labour matters should be set up as an integral part of the new institutional framework for the promotion and protection of world peace after the First World War (Morse, 1969).
The Treaty of Versailles also called for a multilingual journal of original research, which would support the ILO’s mission but remain academically independent, dealing with topical issues within industry and employment that are of broad and international interest (‘Treaty of Versailles’, 1919).
Following the Second World War, the ILO became a United Nations agency, tasked with advancing social justice and promoting decent work. One of the unique features of the organisation is its pioneering tripartite structure, that requires balanced representation of the national governments, employers and workers of its 187 Member States. Together, they address world of work challenges, set and monitor international labour standards, and work with development cooperation partners on projects and programmes to help realise the Decent Work Agenda.
The importance of open access
In 2023, the ILO adopted a policy of open access for all its published materials. The ILR’s Managing Editor, Prof. Aristea Koukiadaki, qualifies that the journal’s interest in open access ‘goes beyond mere compliance’. As she explains, the editorial board keenly recognises that Article Processing Charges (APCs) and inflated library subscriptions are a barrier to global readership and authorship. Overcoming obstacles to access is intrinsically important for a journal whose mission since its inception has been to publish contributions to the development of decent work and social justice across the world.
The requirement to publish in multiple languages is a distinctive feature of the journal — “part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles stipulates that the organisation should ‘edit and publish in French and English, and in such other languages that the Governing Body may think desirable’ (‘Treaty of Versailles’, 1919). The journal currently publishes in English, French and Spanish, and its multilingualism supports the aim of both the journal and the organisation: worldwide engagement, both in ‘composition and spirit’, based on the understanding that ‘the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve conditions in their own countries’ (Morse, 1969).
A closer look at the ILR’s content demonstrates the necessity of a wide and unimpeded reach. For example, a 2024 special issue examines the formalisation of paid domestic work. It draws on the context of the ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention, which has informed international policy on social protection methods for these precarious workers since 2011. The special issue provides a space for dialogue between policy makers, researchers, and the domestic workers whose experience is included. When this research is freely accessible to states, collective actors (such as worker representatives and employers’ organisations), and individual workers, it encourages international and individual action in the gradual and hard-to-enforce process of formalising domestic work.
While the desirability of open access is obvious in this context, it is nevertheless significant that the ILO, as a United Nations agency with a global audience, explicitly requires open access. This is based on the ILO’s ethical understanding that publicly funded research should be made available for public use. As the ILR’s Managing Editor Professor Koukiadaki summarises, ‘the ILO is in an ideal position to support open access in a way that signals the importance of research as a public good’.
Shared mission
There is a strong mission alignment between the OLH and the ILR — both seek to address systemic inequities within the production and dissemination of scholarship. As the OLH’s Executive Director Dr Caroline Edwards explains:
Working with the ILR editorial team, you can see how important it is that research on work and employment is free to access. But also, just as important, that this research is free for authors to publish – without encountering barriers to publication because profit-making publishers impose article publishing costs. So many academic journals are vital to communities beyond the academy – in the case of the ILR, this includes the various stakeholders that support the ILO’s work, including governments, worker and employer representatives, professionals and civil society organisations that focus on decent work and social justice. As scholars, we must insist that the publishing sector demonstrates a transformative shift away from paywalls and their replacement with pay-to-publish schemes. This is why we set up the OLH and, a decade later, it’s still an issue that too many academic publishers have failed to address.
The goal of the OLH as a humanities and social sciences publisher is to liberate research from commercial control. This goal is informed by the so-called journals “serials crisis,” in which global publishing corporations extract huge profits from universities, often through unpaid editorial labour, without providing universities with a sufficient return on their investment. Since it launched in 2015, the OLH has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the brokenness of the commercial system, while modelling how publishing can and should be academic-led and community owned.
Prof. Koukiadaki recalls that in early discussions about flipping the journal, the OLH stood out as a publisher because it is led and managed with significant academic involvement. Whilst the ILR editorial board sought a venue to publish the journal open access, they were also aware that many current publishing models are not sustainable. ‘We were concerned about the direction of academic publishing’, reflects Aristea, and ‘the ILO as well as the editorial board wanted to support a publishing model that felt truly sustainable and that could represent an alternative to the current model’.
Bespoke development work to support multlingualism
Although OLH journals can publish in any language, the OLH’s submission platform, Janeway, is based on a single language model. This means that the back office supporting journals, which offer workflows for managing submissions, peer review, copyediting, typesetting, and production, must be navigated in English. The ILR’s migration from its previous platform to the OLH therefore represents an exciting opportunity to design translation functionality into Janeway’s standard workflow. This will make it possible for all users (i.e. authors, editors, reviewers, and production support teams) to interact with the whole system in their chosen language. Opening author submission workflows in English, French, and Spanish will improve equity. Crucially, this aligns with the OLH’s broader mission to tackle the ongoing colonial impact of centring English as the default language of global scholarly publishing.
Developing a multilingual model of publishing presents various technical and conceptual challenges. For example, should journals like the ILR publish under three different ISSNs, one for each language, which aligns with current ISSN guidance and helps with continuity in archiving? Or can we reimagine this legacy of print publishing, now that digital infrastructures make it possible to link journals together, using different interfaces for different languages? What about the systemic issues of indexing, archiving, discovery, and cataloguing systems that use English as the default language of record? A study published in October 2024 found that only about 17% of the library and information science (LIS) journals indexed by the citation database Scopus are multilingual. Without multilingual indexing, these global systems and databases perpetuate inequality.
Another challenge facing the OLH’s software engineers is the development of a bespoke translation plugin for Janeway, which would allow editors to assign tasks and store the final translated versions before the typesetting process. Currently, Janeway’s workflow is linear in design, but the workflow required by ILR editorial and translation teams represents more of a dialogue, with free-flowing conversation between editors, translators, and external contractors.
As the ILR’s Publishing Coordinator Leo Vita-Finzi reflects, the fluidity of the process partly derives from ‘the ILO’s institutional commitment to substantive editorial support, in recognition that authors may be submitting in their second language’. Authors may require help navigating national conventions in academic writing and substantive editing ensures that the translated versions are consistent, as well as accessible to a general audience. This high level of editorial support is designed to empower authors in the publishing process, helping to overcome the barriers to publishing and access which disproportionately affect scholars working in the Global South.
The development work being undertaken at the OLH’s publishing platform will need to facilitate this ethical commitment to dialogue, while also enabling the ILR editors to keep their processes documented, systematic, and transparent — a key reason behind the decision to migrate the journal to a formalised workflow platform. To get this balance right, detailed conversations are required between the OLH’s technical team and the ILR editors.
At the OLH we are in a good position to undertake this challenge – historically, this kind of collaboration has been key to Janeway’s success. Our in-house software developers have always worked day-to-day on improving Janeway through collaboration with the OLH editorial team, as well as editors in our wider OLH journals community to help shape how the platform evolves. We draw on insights from real and idiosyncratic scholarly communities because these insights align with our scholar-led ethos – empowering and centring scholars in the publishing process.
For more information visit the ILR’s new home on the Open Library of Humanities platform.
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