Thank you for this invitation. I imagine that I have been invited here because I have been working on the issue of the transformation of science for nearly 40 years. In 1984, I published the first article offering a sociological explanation for what is called the value of a language in a scientific field. In 1991, I participated in a study commissioned by the Government of Quebec on the presence of French in scientific publications. I have also worked with Camille Limoges, who for a long time held the position of deputy minister in Quebec, on a study on the use of manuals in science courses. What strikes me is the reason why we are back here, 40 years later, discussing the same problem: it is because we use general, conflated categories that are not sufficiently precise.
I am therefore going to use the three minutes I have left to at least untangle the problems. I want to make sure that the action the government takes is rational and effective. I am going to show you that it is very easy to have visions that are generous but are inapplicable and do not correspond with the reality and dynamics of science.
The first of these is that we have to stop talking about science in general terms. It doesn't mean anything. We have to separate the natural sciences, on one hand, from the social sciences and humanities, on the other, for one very simple reason: the dynamics in the scientific community of researchers is totally different.
Since the early 1980s, in the natural sciences, for example physics, chemistry or biology, the universal language of academic journals has been English. That must not be confused with the teaching of science in francophone universities, which is done in French, and the language of manuals or course notes, which also have to be in French. On the one hand, we have the market for scientific publishing; on the other, life in the laboratory. In my opinion, in a laboratory at the Université de Montréal, for example, things have to be done in French; the teaching has to be in French and the manuals have to be accessible in that language. So we must not talk about science in general terms.
When an electron is discovered, for example, that is very specialized. We have this generous idea that the public must have access to the knowledge because it is the public who are paying, but that is absurd. With all due respect, I have to say that probably no one among you here would understand an article about artificial intelligence. That is not a big deal, since the function of francophone science journalists and popular science journals in French, like Québec Science, is to make very technical knowledge accessible in French, for example regarding quantum computers, knowledge that is generally published in very specialized academic journals. Québec Science is in French. Knowledge is being made accessible in French by Quebec researchers like Yoshua Bengio who publish their fundamental work in the language of computing, which is English.
We therefore have to stop mixing everything together and thinking that translating all scientific publications into both languages will have an effect. A bit later, if we have time, I will tell you about France, where that exact experiment was done, and I predicted its failure. Ten years later, in fact, a stop was put to the experiment, which consisted of systematically translating sociology and political science journals that were completely in English, as if there was a pre-existing market, when there was no demand. Millions of euros were wasted because physics, sociology, history and mathematics were mixed together. The dynamics of the scientific communities are different and that has to be taken into account.
In the case of French, the most important thing for us is to make sure that the practices followed in the natural sciences are not applied to the social sciences and humanities. That is what is being done in the universities by evaluating so-called international journals. A little earlier in the meeting, the term "impact factor" was used. Impact factor is an obsession in the natural sciences that has been transposed to the social sciences. I have written an entire book on that subject. I showed how widespread the confusion was between the impact factor, which measures the impact of an academic journal's impact, and the article itself. They are not the same thing. There is a huge amount of confusion.
In a spirit of generosity, it is thought that translating scientific articles is suddenly going to make the science more visible. I hope I will have time during the question period that follows to show you in detail that if we want to solve problems, we have to explain what we are talking about every time. Are we talking about research in physics or in sociology? Are we talking about the Érudit platform or open access? Are we talking about Plan S open access in Europe? These are all different things, and when they are all mixed together, it creates confusion and ineffectiveness.
Thank you.