Introduction to the Special Issue: Researching, Teaching, and Supporting Research Publication - Issues for Users of English as an Additional Language

The ‘industry’ of research publication has now grown to mammoth proportions and its participants—authors, reviewers, editors, publishers and more—come from increasingly diverse locations and backgrounds, including of language. However, the language in which the vast majority of this research is published is now English, a situation that incorporates both advantages and disadvantages for participants, which are distributed unevenly. The proportion of the world’s population that uses English as an additional Language (EAL) now far outnumbers that of people using it as their first language—the so-called ‘native speakers’ [1]—and the effects of this change on the language itself and on the publication of research in it are wide-reaching. A growing cohort of scholars worldwide is engaged in researching the issues emerging from this situation and interacting with related communities who support research communication by EAL authors and/or teach English for research publication purposes (ERPP) [2]. One key community of these scholars meets under the banner PRISEAL—Publishing and Presenting Research Internationally: Issues for Speakers of English as an Additional Language, and this Special Issue features papers from the most recent PRISEAL conference, held in Coimbra, Portugal in November 2015. Following the precedent set at earlier meetings in Tenerife (2007) and Katowice (2011), the conference sought contributions from the widest possible range of scholars and practitioners involved in these issues: journal publishers, editors, and referees; authors’ editors and translators; teachers, materials writers, and course designers for ERPP; and scholars within humanities and social science fields, including applied linguistics. The aim is to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches, and in 2015 topics of interest included these: