Linguistics scholars have joined forces to level the playing field in academia with an effort to offer free proofreading for academic papers written by colleagues who aren¡¯t native English speakers.

The service, named?, is in a six-month pilot phase, having been set up by a group of volunteers in partnership with the open access journal?Glossa Psycholinguistics. But it tackles a global problem.

¡°The concern regarding linguistic discrimination is widespread in academia, especially outside of anglophone countries,¡± said Carmen Saldana, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of comparative language science at the University of Z¨¹rich and one of the researchers behind the project.

Already, the effort has drawn ¡°a lot of support¡± from others who want to help, she said. Its mission resonates with many researchers who, like Dr Saldana, speak good English but know what it¡¯s like to be asked by a journal to get a native speaker to review their papers, at additional cost.

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¡°There¡¯s always this idea that you¡¯re not native, you¡¯re never going to be good enough,¡± she said.

The language barrier can be especially crippling for younger researchers who don¡¯t have the connections or resources of established scholars, said Mora Maldonado, a?postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and another of the initiative¡¯s founders.

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¡°Especially as students, we were struggling to get people to proofread what we wrote¡­my supervisors weren¡¯t English native speakers and I didn¡¯t have money to pay a proofreader,¡± she said.

She hoped that in the short term, LingProof can help narrow the gap between academics who have access to native English speakers and those who don¡¯t.

But the academics caution that efforts like theirs aren¡¯t the solution to the problem.

Dr Saldana acknowledged that ¡°it¡¯s difficult to ask people to work for free¡± and that as scholars, ¡°we don¡¯t want to exploit ourselves more¡±, but said that for those who participate, there are long-lasting rewards: they glean knowledge and help to strengthen a bed of openly accessible research.

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And she took issue with the broader assumption that English is the lingua franca of academe.

¡°We don¡¯t believe that English is the only language that science should be published in,¡± said Dr Saldana, adding that she hoped the initiative can also spur debate around the role of language in academia.

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com