DEVELOPING VIETNAMESE SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN A NON ENGLISH SPEAKING CONTEXT: CURRENT CHALLENGES AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Vietnam’s scientific publishing landscape is expanding rapidly, yet most domestic journals remain marginal in international indexing systems and global scholarly communication. This paper develops an integrated, governance oriented analysis of Vietnamese journal development under a non English speaking context, with particular attention to how language, evaluation incentives, editorial capacity, and open science pressures interact. Building on evidence from prior studies of Vietnam’s publication growth and collaboration structure, barriers faced by Vietnamese scholars—especially in the social sciences and humanities—and journal level compliance gaps for regional and global indexing, we argue that Vietnam’s journal system is constrained less by “individual quality deficits” than by structural bottlenecks: fragmented governance, weak professionalization of editorial work, limited international visibility infrastructure, and policy incentives that emphasize counted outputs over ecosystem quality. To address these challenges, we adapt the “journal ecological chain” approach used in open science contexts to articulate how actors (authors, editors, publishers, funders, platforms, regulators) and value flows (knowledge, reputation, resources) co evolve. We further connect journal governance to integrity and transparency tools, including open peer review, open access development pathways, and data stewardship norms such as FAIR (Wilkinson et al., 2016). The paper concludes with a staged policy roadmap for Vietnam that emphasizes bilingual discoverability, editorial professionalization, sustainable open access financing, transparent integrity standards, and periodic policy revision mechanisms informed by comparative regulatory scholarship.