MOSCOW, April 14 The Russian publishing house «Nauka» should again become the center of state support for scientific book publishing, on the basis of which Russian scientific periodicals should be developed as an important part of world scientific communication, said director of the publishing house Nikolay Fedoseenkov.
The Publishing House of the Russian Academy of Sciences (today the Federal State Budgetary Institution «Publishing House «Nauka»), which has become one of the most authoritative publishing organizations in the country and the world, was organized on April 14, 1923 in Petrograd.
«Based on the results of the past hundred years, the most important thing is that the Nauka publishing house continues to develop,» the director said.
According to Fedoseenkov, there are two key areas for the development of the publishing house. “Firstly, Nauka should again become the center of state support for scientific book publishing. And secondly, it is necessary to develop Russian scientific periodicals on the basis of the Nauka publishing house, which is an important part of world scientific communication,” he noted.
The first head of the publishing house was academician Alexander Fersman, and the first edition published by the publishing house was the next volume of Izvestiya Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, published at the end of 1924.
The publication of scientific papers and journals has become one of the most important activities of the publishing house. The publications of the Academy of Sciences were, in fact, a report on the activities of its scientific institutions and the results of the work of scientists and leading scientific schools of the country.
Since August 1925, after the renaming of the Russian Academy of Sciences into the USSR Academy of Sciences, the publishing house changed its name to the Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1934, the publishing house moved to Moscow, and the Leningrad branch of the Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences was formed in Leningrad. During the Great Patriotic War, the publishing house was evacuated to Kazan.
The largest diversified research and publishing holding in Russia, «Nauka» specializes in publishing and distributing scientific books and journals in all areas of science. In Russia and abroad, publications from the series «Literary Monuments», «Peoples and Cultures», «Popular Science Literature», «Monuments of Russian Science» and so on are known. «Nauka» is the only state scientific publishing house that unites three branches of book publishing: publishing, printing, and book distribution. Publishing offices operate in the largest cities of Russia — Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk.
Over the years, «Nauka» published the complete works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky and others, the works of great Russian scientists — Mikhail Lomonosov, Dmitry Mendeleev, Vladimir Vernadsky were republished.
Today, one of the flagship projects of the publishing house is the 20-volume collection «History of Russia», which is being developed jointly with the Russian Historical Society and the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin.