Good evening to the members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.
I'm here today representing Fonds de recherche du Québec, whose chief executive officer is Quebec's chief scientist. Three government organizations report to the minister responsible for science. There is a fund for each major research sector: social sciences and humanities, health sciences, and natural sciences and engineering. This resembles the structure for federal research councils.
The Fonds' mandates are to support: research groups and projects; education and research, through master's, doctoral and postdoctoral grants; partnerships development, from the local to the international level; and dissemination.
English is now the leading language of science around the world. As the bibliometric data show, the trend towards the anglicization of science has been in evidence for several decades now.
Web of Science, an exceedingly reliable database of world citations, shows that between 1980 and 2020, a 40-year period, the percentage of natural sciences and engineering papers published in French has dropped from approximately 4% to 0.1% worldwide, from 3% to 1% in Canada, and from 14% to 0.25% in Quebec. The results of the work done by Vincent Larivière, the Canada Research Chair in the Transformations of Scholarly Communication at the Université de Montréal, show similar results for scientific publications by Quebec researchers in international health science journals. For social sciences and the humanities, the percentage published in French is somewhat higher, but here too, the trend is towards anglicization.
The internationalization of research has an impact. The percentage of Quebec publications jointly written by at least one scientist from another country went from 35% in 2000 to 60% in 2019. In order of importance, Quebec's three main collaborating countries are the United States, France and Great Britain.
The goal is not so much to try to compete with science in English, but to promote science in French and enhance research and publication in French. Science in French, or in any other language, is just as important as science in English. English may well be the common language, but it rests on linguistic diversity. If language, which is tied to a region's or a country's culture, shapes our view of the world, then it must be acknowledged that it is in our best interests to promote linguistic diversity to make science richer in terms of perspectives, outcomes and impacts. While science in Quebec may be considered local compared to the rest of the world, its impacts and outcomes are nevertheless important to the people of Quebec, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where the focus is contextualized in terms of Quebec realities.
Science in French can bank on 300 million francophones on five continents, and this number is expected to grow to 700 million by the year 2050.
As a research fund, we promote science in French through our scholarship and granting programs. As a result of our support, some 40 academic social science and humanities journals have for many years now been published and included on the Érudit journal platform.
To raise awareness of publications in French, we launched a competition in 2021 through which, every month, three French-language publications each receive a prize from us of $2000. We recently opened the competition to students to encourage the next generation to publish in French.
In 2012, we established the Relève étoile awards, awarded to three students every month, one in each sector, for one of their publications. During the first 24 months of the competition, 17 of the 72 publications that were awarded the prize were in French, whereas over the past 24 months, in 2021 and 2022, only two of the 72 were in French. That's another sign of the decline of French in science.
Quebec's chief scientist is the president of the International Network for Governmental Science Advice, a network of chief scientists and scientific advisors from around the world, in which English is the predominant language of work. That's why, under his direction, the launch of the Réseau francophone international en conseil scientifique will be announced on November 3.
In view of the importance of science in French, we will be organizing a two-day forum in the spring to take stock of the situation and determine the best ways of promoting science in French.
Thank you.