Chinese will not replace English as academia’s lingua franca

Recently, my research data has led me to think more about the impact of international language in academic systems on the internationalization in the curriculum (particularly, in Schools of Education), and this article furthers my thinking. For me, the "scientific journals" mentioned in this article seem not to include the journals in social sciences (should I group Education in social sciences ?) and humanities. I want to know whether, or to what extent, the ubiquity of English in the social sciences and humanities literature (maybe not? I haven't done any research on this) has been an obstacle to the development progress of social sciences and humanities in countries where English is not an official language and/or not the primary language used by the majority of people. I also wondered whether or how the ubiquity of English literature has been an obstacle to global collaboration and communication regarding topics in social sciences and humanities.

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For Chinese to become a truly functional and widespread language in the scientific and technological academic world a major requirement would be it's widespread use of the pinyin alphabet in its journal articles. Firstly, learning the 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese characters is a great burden on scientists and people in general to master to effectively read not only Chinese general journals and written materials but especially scientific journals. Scientists do not have the several years to devote just to learn the characters let alone the language itself which is by the way quite straight forward and equal in difficulty grammatically as Indonesian or Italian. Learning the Chinese characters alone is equal to about learning two to three languages in terms of time allotted. Scientists in general would rather devote that long term time in learning and researching their fields of speciality. Furthermore, those keen in learning fluentlt the use of 2000to 3000 Chinese characters are quite welcome to devote that energy and time, but scientists have better things to do or rather learn a language with a more convenient and easier alphabet be it German Russian Polish Italian etc.