Publication activity of Russian universities: From “academic capitalism” to “academic socialism”

Abstract

In the current geopolitical situation, Russian scientists may face difficulties in publishing the results of their research in foreign journals indexed in leading scientometric databases. Until recently, the productivity of scientific activity of Russian universities was mainly assessed by the number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, which we consider in the context of the introduction of “academic capitalism”. In particular, in the updated version of the state program “Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation”, one of the targets assumes that Russia will take the 5th place in the world by 2030 in terms of the proportion of articles indexed in international databases. We evaluate the realism of achieving this indicator relative to the number of articles indexed in Scopus. The necessity to change the approach to the assessment of the productivity of scientific activity using the concept of “academic socialism” is substantiated. In the framework of this concept, it is proposed to develop a state program for expanding the number of Russian journals indexed in the world scientometric databases with a guarantee of financial support for the implementation of the Diamond Open Access model — no fee for publication or processing of the article and fully open access to it.