Multilingual open-access publishing in Germany

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 213 journals published in Germany.

A majority appear to be published in English, but many use only German or are multilingual with German, English and other languages.

Online multilingual publishing is increasingly a reasonable option because authors can now easily find editing and translation support for working in a second language.

It is also easier than ever before for anyone without second-language skills to use mechanical translation tools for the purpose of literature discovery.

Mechanical translation can be used for search terms to find articles, to search within articles, and also to translate passages of particular interest.

This can help reduce the costs for professional translation (for a particular project) because it is possible to select just the particular sections of text that are needed for our research and writing.

At the same time, there may be an increase in the global demand for translators among researchers who previously might not have considered spending anything on translation.

My expectation is that the demand for professional translation will become larger and more diverse, but also more fragmentary, with many small jobs being requested by a wider range of people involved in research and research-based communication.

There are also opportunities now for the development of highly specialist but extremely multilingual journal- and book-publishing. This would be a style of scientific publishing that has rarely been seen, and could be usefully developed through the medium of specialist blogging sites (especially if the latter can be linked in neat ways to print-on-demand services).

Specialist, extreme multilingual publishing (SEMPU).

Is this a name and publishing style that can catch on?