Dear readers, subscribers, and friends,
We write to announce a change in BMCR’s language policy.
Commencing with reviews commissioned on June 1, 2025, and going forward, BMCR will publish only in English. This is a very substantial change in the life of BMCR and deserves a word of explanation.
BMCR’s editorial process seeks to ensure that every review we publish is read three times: by an editor, an associate editor, and a senior editor. Ideally, each reader would have the capacity to edit the review both for style and language and for subject-area content. But the simple fact of the matter is that BMCR lacks the capacity to edit all reviews in foreign languages to the level of care to which we aspire. Too often, a given editor of a non-Anglophone texts professes the ability to read for content but not for language, while the person who reads that text for language lacks subject-area expertise. We have been concerned about this issue for many years.
When BMCR was founded in 1990, it sought to publish short notices of new publications very quickly and it accepted submissions only in English. From the beginning, BMCR’s use of email and policy of open access to its archive rapidly engaged readers and reviewers worldwide.
In early years, only short ASCII reviews could be disseminated by email; long reviews were limited to the print publication and a gopher site. BMCR moved to web publication in the mid-1990s, and in 1998 its first true web publishing platform went live. Taking advantage of the new online format, some reviewers began to write very long (and sometimes quite excellent) texts. Web publication also meant publishing in multiple languages was easier. Starting in the early 2000s, BMCR began to allow publication in five languages in order to draw on the extraordinary international community of contemporary Classics.
By 2009, BMCR had imposed its current word limit of 2000 words, but because of that word limit, almost every reviewer began to write between 1998 and 2002 words (really! The standard deviation is very, very small). As a result, there has been a huge increase in workload for the volunteers who make up the editorial board, the associate editors, and the senior editors.
But the problem is not limited to workload. As we have stressed, we are also concerned that we do not edit foreign-language reviews to the standard of care to which we aspire.
Given the volume of reviews that BMCR publishes, it has proved impracticable to recruit sufficient members to the editorial board to address the problem. We are electing now to change strategy and to move to English-only publication. Our decision is informed by the high quality now achieved by computerized translation. A review written in transparent prose can be translated via Google or Deepl with great accuracy—indeed, the resulting translation is consistently better than many of the English-language reviews that we receive from persons who are not native speakers of English but who wish to publish in English because it will result in a wider readership for their reviews. A further consideration that informs our decision is that many authors of books written in languages other than English contact BMCR each year, asking that their book be reviewed in English in order to make its content available to as many persons as possible.
BMCR is committed to defining the field broadly, embracing the many scholars and works that make up contemporary classical studies, vetting reviews thoroughly, and publishing relatively quickly, all completely open access. We tried hard for many years to make multilingual publishing work. This change to our language policy is necessary to ensure the sustainability of the journal’s core tenets for years to come.
yours,
Clifford Ando
Camilla MacKay
Senior Editors, BMCR