(16 Apr 2026) According to a new study from the Université de Montréal, the English language’s share of academic output in scholarly publishing fell from 94 per cent to 85 per cent between 1990 and 2023. Researchers analysed 88 million articles and 1.48 billion cited references using the OpenAlex and Dimensions databases.
The findings, published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology1, reveal that Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish are the only languages expanding faster than English. This growth stems from successful national policies and robust regional publishing infrastructures.
Indonesian has experienced the most remarkable growth in recent publishing news. It rose from near invisibility in the early 1990s to represent 2.69 per cent of global scholarly publications by 2023. Consequently, it has now surpassed both French and German in volume.
This breakthrough followed a 2014 government decree. The mandate required all scholarly publications to be freely accessible online. This led to the widespread adoption of Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open-source publishing platform.
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