Scientific Publication in Russia: Why and How?

Abstract

The modern scientific community somewhat forgets the original meaning of the word publication (from Latin publico, I declare publicly): publicizing. Questionable administrative restrictions lead to the fact that expansion of readership is an author’s almost last concern. This article considers characteristic examples of the unjustified narrowing of readership imposed on the author. In particular, authors are forced to take their articles to journals indexed in the Web of Science, and most of these journals never fall into open access; i.e., they are inaccessible to the general reader. As a result, leading Russian journals not included into privileged bibliographic databases find themselves in extremely unfavorable conditions. The relevance of scientific monographs is generally questioned. The use of available anti-plagiarism software, which is binding today, often leads to anecdotal effects. Administrative barriers slow down the introduction of progressive forms of online publishing. Among Russian scientific journals, only a few allow online corrections noticed by authors. “Alive” publications—texts updated by authors to reflect the latest results and the current state of affairs in the science field under consideration—are exceptionally rare in Russia. Just two or three Russian journals have responded to the global trend of PDF-to-HTML evolution, although this evolution opens up an unlimited scope for the improvement of online scientific publishing tools.