The redistribution of the market for the publication and distribution of academic scientific journals has led not only to serious delays in the publication of scientists’ works, but also to Russia’s self-isolation in the global market of scientific periodicals. By the beginning of December 2024, almost 75% of Russian academic scientific journals have not gone to press on time. This is the price of striving to publish scientific journals with a “Russian identity” and without foreign influence. T-invariant tells us what has already happened to Russian scientific periodicals and what else may happen to them.
Out of range
The crisis in academic periodicals did not emerge in the last year. It began with the election of a new president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Gennady Krasnikov, on 20 September 2022, and the subsequent change in the composition of the presidium, including those responsible for scientific publications.
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At the end of September 2022, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Academician Alexei Khokhlov, who previously supervised the publication of academic journals, wrote in his Telegram channel, “I no longer work at the Russian Academy of Sciences, but I follow what is going on there.” Instead of Khokhlov, former head of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), academician Vladislav Panchenko, a person close to Mikhail Kovalchuk, president of the Kurchatov Institute and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has been appointed curator of the RAS’s scientific-publishing activities . The rest of the duties of the now former vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Khokhlov, were handed over to Academician Stepan Kalmykov. As one of Khokhlov’s colleaguesput it at the time , “the person responsible for scientific journals in the RAS is like the Secretary of the Central Committee for Agriculture. The economy is large, restless, requiring daily care. Everyone thinks that they know about it and, accordingly, everyone is dissatisfied”.
Alexei Khokhlov, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Photo: new.ras.ru
Since 2018, technical services for the publication of academic scientific journals have been provided by companies determined on the basis of annual auctions. As in 2022, the role of publisher of the natural science collection of journals in 2023 went to LLC “United Editorial Board”, and the socio-humanities collection – LLC “Integration: Education and Science”. In February 2023, the first alarm bell rang: it turned out that it was impossible to get acquainted with the electronic versions of the January issues of journals in Russian published by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moreover, it was not only the full texts, but even the abstracts and tables of contents of the January issues. This was not the case in previous years.
In his Telegram channel, Khokhlov wrote: “Like a blast furnace, it is impossible to suspend the magazine without very serious consequences. With this in mind, the magazine sphere requires daily attention, it cannot be delegated to technical workers.”
The same situation with magazine issues continued in June 2023. The point is that in 2023, a decision was made to make it mandatory to publish articles of RAS journals in Russian on the platform of the Russian Centre for Scientific Information (RCSI, the successor of RFBR). The RSCI was established shortly before the election of a new RAS president in 2022, received considerable state funding for this purpose, but it was not ready for the placement of materials. Accordingly, the publications did not appear either on the RAS website or in elibrary. Only some academic journals, which at their own risk placed issues on their own websites, thus provided access to their publications. The situation began to change only in September 2023, when the RCNI website published news that access to scientific academic journals will be provided from IP-addresses of Russian state and autonomous organisations of science and higher education. However, in order to do so, the organisations must conclude agreements with the RCNI. The confusion with the issue of academic journals in Russian remained until the end of 2023.
Vladimir Panchenko and Mikhail Kovalchuk at the meeting of heads of BRICS academies of sciences. Photo: nrcki.ru
Against this background, in late November, at a session organised as part of the III Congress of Young Scientists, Panchenko announced the decision “at the highest level (in the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the Russian government)” to transfer the rights to issue academic journals to the publishing house Nauka. However, no official documents formalising this decision have been issued. Auctions for the provision of services for the publication of academic scientific journals in 2024 were cancelled. It seemed that the situation with the publication of RAS scientific journals only worsened.
8 February 2024 entered the history of the RAS not only as a day of celebration of its 300th anniversary, but also as a day when the country’s leadership announced the most important decisions for the Academy. In particular, the Russian government decree №281-r declared the oldest Russian publishing house of scientific literature “Nauka” to be the only supplier of services for the RAS for the publication of scientific journals and books. It should be said that a few weeks before this, the academic community had already heard alarming rumours about the transfer of all publishing functions of the RAS into one hands. On the one hand, the academic community was relieved: previously it had to hold annual auctions and order publishing services from various organisations, and this was a troublesome business. On the other hand, it was alarmed, because for more than five years in connection with the arrears to tax and other authorities in the amount of more than half a billion rubles the publishing house “Nauka” did not publish journals. It was clear that for some unknown reason, a decision was made at the top to invest huge funds from the state budget into the unprofitable publishing house so that it could immediately start publishing more than 140 Russian-language academic journals.
Identity is our everything
Nikolai Fedoseenkov, director of Nauka , commented on the government’s decision inan interview as follows.
“Nauka” will return the identity, concentrate the full cycle of publishing work, accelerate publishing processes, eliminate foreign influence on the editorial policy of journals and bring the Academy’s scientific journals to a new round of development. Unfortunately, the publishing house, which has been engaged in publishing journals since 2018, has not been able to maintain the identity of the editions. We are very grateful to the president of the country, the government and the RAS for helping to put an end to the vicious practice.”
What exactly was meant by “identity” to be returned and “foreign influence” to be got rid of, Fedoseenkov did not explain.
Later, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Fedoseyenkov shared his plans for the future: “At present we are talking about publishing more than 140 journals, but in the next two years we plan to increase this number to 300. Then we won’t have to turn to large international publishers and ask: ‘Take our package, sell it, please’. We will become competitive on the world market of scientific periodicals”. Gradually it becomes clear that somewhere upstairs a sovereign scenario of publishing and distribution on the world markets of scientific periodicals is being worked out. Further, clarifying his thought, Fedoseenkov noted: “…today we do not have an independent publishing platform, which accompanies the entire path from writing an article, its review, sending it to the journal, the work of the editorial board with the author, layout, publication and realisation. This is something that only large publishing houses have. We have yet to create such a system. In principle, the country needs a national player capable of talking on the same level as large foreign publishing houses. But this is a goal that we should strive for. In a short time, the level of ambition of the publicly voiced plans of the head of the publishing house has grown considerably.
It should be recalled that at the same time, on 8 February 2024, Vladimir Putin in his speech on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed to entrust it with the responsibility to form a unified database of scientific publications and research in order to provide conditions for the search, exchange and dissemination of scientific information, to promote the results of domestic scientists, to promote science both in Russia and abroad. To solve this problem it was proposed to include in the structure of the RAS together with the publishing house “ Nauka” RCNI, which just “is engaged in the development and maintenance of a platform of periodical scientific publications, editorial and publishing system with a full set of opportunities for the publication and distribution of scientific journals”. The RCNI should represent a national platform of periodical scientific publications, as well as promote “the integration of Russian science and education into the international research space and the dissemination of domestic and foreign scientific experience”. The contours of the task set by the leadership of the country and the RAS are gradually emerging. Namely, to become an independent influential player in the world markets of scientific periodicals, refusing the services of both private and foreign companies, in fact, to revive the state publishing house of the last century.
Nikolay Fedoseenkov, Director of Nauka Publishing House
In November 2024 Alexey Khokhlov summarised the first results: “On the RCNI website, the 2024 issues of the journals published by the RAS are slowly posted, but with a significant delay… the average delay time is 6-7 months. Articles are published only in Russian, prospects of publication of English translations are not clear. The texts of articles are available only in pdf-format, and only from computers of organisations participating in the national subscription, from home computers they cannot be viewed… they are not indexed in Web of Science or Scopus. Therefore, access to the content of these articles for the majority of the world scientific community is extremely difficult”. In the same message Khokhlov complains: “…the vast majority of the world scientific community will simply not read the article (posted on the RCNI platform). Therefore, it will remain a “thing in itself” and will not be able to serve to consolidate the priority on the scientific result. In such a situation, many authors will prefer to send their papers to foreign scientific journals. Already now we can predict that because of this, the number of articles that will be published in the journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2024 will decrease significantly. But just two years ago everything was quite different. Articles were published “month by month”, and simultaneously in Russian and English. I write this with sadness and without any gloating. I proposed to the Vice-President of the RAS V.Y. Panchenko, who is now responsible for the publication of RAS journals, to provide any consulting assistance on the issues of publication of RAS journals. On this topic I have a wealth of many years of experience, which would have allowed me to avoid many mistakes. But, unfortunately, Vladislav Yakovlevich preferred to listen to other “advisers”, which led the whole matter to those deplorable results, which we all now observe”.
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In the same November days in the interview to the newspaper “Search” Alexey Lutay, the head of the Department of information resources provision of the RCNR Alexey Lutay told about the goals and tasks facing the platform created on the state money: “From the information point of view, one of the basic tasks is to collect and process data on Russian and foreign scientific publications in order to ensure their availability – in formats and on the terms that are most convenient for further use. This is exactly the task that has been successfully solved by elibrary and the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) created on the basis of the data collected in elibrary for many years. Why break a well-established tool and change it for something that does not yet exist? Alexei Lutai answers this question: “The creation of RINC was a good idea, which was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Academy of Sciences at the start, but now we are dealing with a private company with a monopoly position and special privileges…”. And what does the country get in return? All organisations that are interested in using the data, including budgetary institutions, are offered by this company to pay an annual licence fee. Individuals are given access to the site only on terms of authorisation, blocking any attempts to collect the necessary data… the issues of cooperation with a private company should still be regulated, putting the strategic interests of our country first. Academician Khokhlov’s reaction in his Telegram channel was immediate: “I leave it to the readers to judge for themselves the fairness of these statements. Many elibrary services (to which RSCNI is still “growing and growing”) are available to individuals without any authorisation, and authorisation itself takes no more than a minute”.And further: “How “strategic interests of the country” and the fact that RINC is a private company are related is also unclear. On the contrary, it is good that the maintenance of elibrary does not require budgetary funds. Unlike RSCNI, which receives considerable budgetary funds, but for these funds it cannot boast any services that would be useful and convenient for scientists”.
It turns out that this initiative, which costs billions of roubles, is undertaken in order to drive a well-working private company out of the market, replacing it with a yet-to-be-operational but state-owned company. In addition, in order to create a properly working system, the RCNI will need a lot of additional time and effort on the part of publishers, organisations, and scientists.
Let us assume that the timely release of Russian-language versions of academic journals and their placement on the RCNI platform (or elsewhere) will be established. But what to do with their English-language versions and providing access to them for the majority of the world scientific community? At present, this task is successfully solved by the American publishing house Pleiades Publishing. It seems that this is the very “foreign influence”, from which the Academy of Sciences, with the assistance of RCNI and publishing house “Nauka” plans to get rid of. The Pleiades group of companies is at the origin of co-operation with Russian and earlier Soviet scientific journals, translating them into English, publishing and distributing English-language versions on the world markets. The history of this co-operation goes back more than half a century. Today the company publishes about 300 scientific journals (it is interesting that from the very beginning the director of Nauka mentioned exactly this number of journals, supposedly necessary to enter the world markets), included in the Eastern Europe Expanded Collection (EEEC), distributed by Springer Nature through the international SpringerLink database. Translated Russian academic journals make up the bulk (more than half) of the EEEC collection. Unlike RCNR and Nauka, Pleiades fulfils its international obligations by hosting English-language academic journals on its platform without any time delay. Moreover, given the difficult situation on the international markets of academic periodicals after the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine, the management of Pleiades decided to continue publishing and co-operating with Russian journals through its Serbian subsidiary PLEIADES RESOURCES DOO BEOGRAD.
In today’s world, a single scientific journal, unless it is a Nature-level journal, has almost no independent value, even if it publishes high-quality scientific content. The volume of scientific information is so large that most scientists and scientific organisations avoid receiving uncertified information. They therefore use the services of libraries and library consortia, which in turn package subscriptions to scientific periodicals only from reputable and certified publishers. The latter carefully select high-quality scientific journals for bundled subscriptions, and the authority of the publishers earned over many years serves as a guarantee of this. Such an authoritative publisher ,along with Elsevier, Wiley and others, is the mentioned Springer Nature with its SpringerLink journal database. Journals from this database find their way into tens of thousands of libraries around the world. More than 20 million readers access articles in SpringerLink journals every month. Therefore, if a scientist has a task to publish the results of his work in a good scientific journal, the journal has a task to get into the database of a reputable publisher. Only then will the results of the scientist’s work be available to his colleagues in different countries and laboratories. Otherwise, the work turns into a kind of desk work. Even placing the work in the public domain on the Internet does not save the situation. And there is no telling how long it will take for a new player in the international publishing market to gain credibility and for its journals to get into the hands of other scientists. There is no guarantee of success: the world of scientific publishing is a highly competitive environment.
Capture by AI
Therefore, attempts to transfer the publication of academic journals in English to a new platform in the publishing house “Nauka” cause increasing concern among Russian scientists. Also of concern are attempts by the Russian Academy of Sciences to restrict the rights of authors, in practice forcing them to transfer the rights to translate and publish manuscripts to themselves. This is done under plausible pretences: there are accusations of Pleiades Publishing that the foreign publishing house concludes contracts directly with authors, bypassing the administrative and bureaucratic superstructure of journal editorial offices and the RAS. However, this does not take into account the circumstances that have developed for well-known reasons, when world authoritative publishing houses avoid dealing with Russian state institutions, fortunately leaving open the possibility of contacts with scientists on an individual level. Pleiades Publishing, thanks to a long tradition of corporate relations, has managed to maintain a “window” for Russian authors with the mutual understanding that scientific journals, perceived de facto and de jure as American, represent the Russian scientific environment. Alexander Shustorovich, head of Pleiades Publishing, talksabout this in detail in his interview. It would seem that the information that Pleiades has registered the English-language names of academic journals as its trademarks also sounds frightening for the Russian Academy of Sciences. But, unfortunately, on the wide market of international publications fraudsters appear with more and more frightening regularity , creating so-called clone journals. Such fraudulent publications masquerade as reputable scientific journals and literally steal even quite experienced authors’ original manuscripts. “Back in 2020, we received letters from Human Physiology and Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, in which the editorial board asked us to deal with the situation when a little-known journal uses our name as its own,” Shustorovich recalls. The whole point of a publisher registering a trademark is to fix the status quo of the publication in a legal sense. In the interview Shustorovich gives examples of journals whose editors tried to publish in English on their own. Their fate is sad, they lack international visibility, no one reads them. “Is this a prospect?” – Shustorovich concludes.
Meanwhile, events are developing more and more rapidly, and already at the end of November 2024 at the IV Congress of Young Scientists in his short report, the director of “Nauka” Nikolai Fedoseenkov highlighted a ripe plan to “capture the world publishing market“. As it turned out, on the platform of the publishing house will be placed English-language (and even Chinese!) translations of publications of Russian scientists in published academic scientific journals. However, now the authorship of these texts will belong to artificial intelligence, acting only as a translator.
The director of the publishing house “Nauka” proudly noted that the translation of a scientific publication takes on average only a couple of minutes, and in the near future will be made and placed on the platform of the publishing house translations of more than ten thousand scientific articles. Thus, the output will be a multi-lingual publishing product, which then in co-operation with other publishers should be brought to the wide world market.
The role of such a bringer of academic publications to the world market was assigned to the relatively young St. Petersburg publishing house “Eko Vector”, which was represented at the congress by its head Igor Rodin. At the end of his speech Rodin informed the audience about the agreement reached with Nauka Publishing House. It is fair to say that by this time Eco Vector had already gained successful experience of co-operation with publishers from Hong Kong and the Emirates.
Leaving aside the quality of automatic translation of scientific articles, the issue of copyright for the English-language (and possibly Chinese) version of a scientific publication created by the AI remained undisclosed. Giving the creation of a scientific text (even a secondary version) to AI is the first step in blurring the fine line between text translation, editing, and AI writing. Nevertheless, the audience cheered the speakers with applause. However, the Congress of Young Scientists is likely to be remembered not for this, but for Stepan Kalmykov’s speech. According to him, Russia publishes more than 32 thousand titles of scientific journals (in reality, a little less than six thousand). And 99% of them, according to the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are absolute rubbish.
Let’s assume that thanks to the “utilisation” of significant sums from the state budget, joint efforts of the RAS, RCNI, “Nauka” and “Eco Vector” will manage to establish a full cycle of publication of academic journals on a new sovereign platform and refuse the services of a reputable international publisher. What will Russian authors do in this case, feeling that the results of their scientific work are becoming invisible to the world scientific community? Obviously, they will “run” to other more authoritative publishers. In confirmation of these words, the TG-channel “Scientific Journals and Databases” recently cited interesting statistics on articles by Russian authors published in journals indexed in Scopus for 2024. The International Journal of Molecular Sciences, an open access journal of the MDPI publishing house with a very ambiguous, according to Academician Khokhlov, reputation, took the first place by the number of publications. The highest ranked academic journal in this rating, Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, took only 6th position. At the same time, the list of authors’ affiliations in descending order is still headed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (13,240). It is followed by MSU (4 762) and SB RAS (3 425). If the dangerous trend really emerging in the academic environment prevails, Russian scientists will find themselves in an even more difficult situation, and the “identity” that the head of the Nauka publishing house plans to restore will become even more blurred.
In conclusion, for completeness of the picture, we would like to look once again at the general position in which the publications of Russian scientists are on the world background in recent years. Pavel Kasyanov, a well-known expert on Web of Science group bibliometrics, in his work Russian Academic Publishing Landscape cites a curious statistic of 2017. In the international Web of Science database, Russian authors rank 15th in terms of the number of indexed publications. However, in terms of the average number of citations per article, our country was 147th between Nigeria and Ukraine. Figures on the average citation in the international Scopus database (data from 2022) were also recently published: “The Russian Federation is in 213th place out of 233 countries that submit their publications in Scopus. At the same time, in terms of the total number of articles, we are in 17th place today (a year ago – in 12th place)”. Thus, for many years in a row Russian authors have been filling international databases with scientific publications with catastrophically low average visibility for the world scientific community. There is no need to prove that the emerging trend towards publishing sovereignty is unlikely to improve this situation.
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Text: Andrey Rostovtsev
Andrey Rostovtsev 17.12.2024