It has practically become a commonplace that,1in the past two decades, pressures for multilingual scholars to publish their work in English continue to intensify and to spread across global contexts. Even more recently, in many locations acceptable target journals have been identified as those included in high-status citation indexes — in other words, target journals have become sanctioned and explicitly linked to the evaluation of and rewards for scholars’ academic work (Curry & Lillis, 2014; Lillis & Curry, 2010). Pressures have also heightened for postdoctoral students to publish before finishing their degrees (Huang, 2010). The research field that investigates various aspects of academic writing for publication has burgeoned, from early studies deconstructing texts in order to analyse generic features (Swales, 1990) to research exploring a wide range of aspects, including the pressures on scholars living and working in specific contexts, their responses to pressures, their writing practices, and their perspectives on all of these aspects (Bennett, 2014; Hanauer & Englander, 2013; Lillis & Curry, 2010). A small but growing strand of research has also explored the impact of national and institutional policies about publishing (Feng, Beckett & Huang, 2013; Lee & Lee, 2013), and the changing nature of scholarly journals (including open access), the practices of journal editors and reviewers, and scholar-writers’ interactions with these powerful gatekeepers (Lillis, 2012; Lillis & Curry, 2015; Sheridan, 2015).

The unrelenting pressure to publish has generated two important trends in relation to supporting multilingual writers in publishing:

These approaches range from writing and publishing guides (for example, Cargill & O'connor, 2013; Curry & Lillis, 2013; Swales & Feak, 2012), to individual consulting through writing centres, to dedicated workshops, to face-to-face and online modules or full-credit courses on writing for publication (Cargill & O'connor, 2006; see also Curry & Lillis, in press). The emergence of these interventionist/pedagogical approaches raises a number of issues, including important questions about the multiple and sometimes conflicting roles of those involved as ‘experts’ and instructors in such programs.