MOSCOW, July 5, Tatyana Pichugina. Last year, Western research teams withdrew from joint projects, journals refused to accept articles from Russia. The EU and the US wanted to isolate Russian science. Why this did not happen is in the article .
They dropped the ballast
«In 2022, publication activity in general fell by 15-20 percent,» states Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexei Khokhlov, head of the Department of Polymer and Crystal Physics at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University.
Vitaly Bagan, Vice-Rector for Research at MIPT, names similar figures. There are several reasons, he says. «Objectively, international cooperation has become more difficult, a number of collaborations, in particular CERN, decided not to indicate the Russian affiliation of the authors. Articles are published, but the organizations where our scientists work remain unnamed. Although everyone knows where these authors come from, and they continue their research,» he notes.
Cases of discrimination based on nationality on the part of reviewers are isolated, although a year ago this was precisely what was feared. It is enough to contact the editor to resolve the problem. «Vilted refusals are more common. When, for example, they refer to the poor grammatical language of authors who have already published dozens of articles in English. Or they write that the article does not correspond to the subject of the journal,» the scientist adds.
One of the reasons for the decline in publication Academician Khokhlov considers the fight against “garbage” articles, that is, frankly hack-work, which serve to cheat indicators, to be active.
Olga Kirillova, President of the Association of Science Editors and Publishers (ANRI), clarifies that the decline was mainly due to publications in conference proceedings : from 30 thousand in 2021 to 15 thousand in 2022.
In recent years, the number of articles from Russia has grown. In 2021, the country ranked ninth in this indicator, in 2022 it dropped to 12th, and now it is 17th. However, Kirillova warns, the data is incomplete because it is taken only from the Scopus database of scientific publications. Russia no longer has access to another extensive analytical database — Web of Science. -ratio=»0.8″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»480″ data-source-sid=»rian_infographics» class=»lazyload» lazy=»1″ />
Science in a changing world
The trend to reduce the number of publications will continue, Olga Kirillova believes. “If in 2022 they published articles submitted in the previous year, now it’s the turn of last year’s, and there are fewer of them. In addition, many researchers have gone abroad, the personnel scientific structure in the country has changed,” the expert explains.
However, it is premature to discuss data for this year, analysts believe, since many Russian publications have not yet been indexed. There will be some reduction, but hardly catastrophic. In addition, the number of articles is not the only indicator of the development of science: it is more important to assess the quality of research, and it is characterized, among other things, by the journals in which our scientists publish, who are the co-authors, how many citations (this will take time).
It should also be taken into account that changes are taking place against the backdrop of a change in leaders in the development of science — China and India are breaking ahead. The interpretation of the results is also influenced by the redistribution of the market of scientific periodicals, the revision of the science assessment paradigm. The protectionist scientific policy of Russia makes its contribution. Last March, when the obligatory requirement to report with publications recorded in international scientometric databases was abolished, part of the scientific community breathed a sigh of relief: now there is no need to figure out how to publish in foreign journals.
At the same time, according to the ANRI, more and more journals from Russia are included in the Scopus database: in 2022, 35 publications were accepted, in 2023 — 15. For example, in March, the Digital Diagnostics magazine of the Diagnostic Center and telemedicine of the Moscow Health Department.
A couple more highlights. ANRI gives these figures for 2018-2023: out of almost 639 thousand articles by Russian authors, 20 percent are in Russian. And the HSE notes a sharp increase in the share of publications in journals of the MDPI publishing house, which needs to be discussed in more detail. capital. Initially focused on chemistry and biology, the range of disciplines quickly expanded. Soon they switched to the Open access model — when access to the journal is free for readers, and the authors of articles, on the contrary, pay for publication.
«MDPI literally broke into the international market. They have a very high quality service. It is easier for scientists to send an article there than to go through lengthy procedures in other editions,» says Academician Khokhlov.
«Recently, we publish research results mainly in the journals of the MDPI publishing house. Experience has shown that they are practically not politicized, and we do not receive unfriendly comments from the editors or reviewers that are not related to the essence of the work. The cost of publications is 2,500 Swiss francs, but there are the opportunity to receive discount coupons from the editorial office if you review articles by other authors,» says Anna Kudryavtseva, Deputy Director for Research at the V. A. Engelgardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Due to success in the market of scientific periodicals MDPI is accused of «predation», that is cheating due to low-quality content, and violation of ethical standards. In 2014, the publishing house was blacklisted by Bill. And although the list was closed under the threat of a court, a trail of distrust has been trailing behind MDPI ever since.
«MDPI is closest in essence to the journal Scientific Reports published by Springer Nature. Universal coverage, many editors, grouping of articles on topics called special issues,» explains Alexei Ivanov, Deputy Director of the Institute of the Earth's Crust of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Geology and Mineralogy, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences . He is also the editor of MDPI — Minerals.
According to Ivanov, the publishing house is attracted by the speed of work, which is critical in the Russian financing system. This is often the only way to quickly release an article without violating ethical standards. The scientist draws attention to one more point: «Many Russian authors have never published in international journals. And MDPI seems to be not so scary.»
According to preliminary data, more than 20 percent of articles from Russia are now published in MDPI. This is a multiple increase compared to last year.
Long-standing problems of domestic journals
The recently published Clarivate Analytics report on the world's best journals includes 160 Russian publications. At the same time, scientists note that most domestic periodicals are too traditional, losing in terms of service level and speed of publications. And most importantly, there are not enough journals for a rapidly developing science. «They are critically lacking in new areas — genetics, AI,» notes Vitaly Bagan.
The market for scientific periodicals in Russia is not only traditional, but also extremely fragmented. According to HSE estimates, we have about 320 publishing houses. The most famous is «Science». At the same time, contracts for the release of the best academic journals do not go to him, but to the American company Pleiades publishing.
Pleiades publishing has published nearly 200 academic journals since 1993. An agreement with Springer Nature allowed these journals to be included in the package for scientific libraries around the world. In 2019, Pleiades registered in the United States the rights to the titles of the RAS journals it translates. Scientists regarded this as a desire to take possession of the publications, and last year the editors of five journals belonging to the A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) broke the agreement.
“They have a debt of one and a half million dollars for three years. We gave them Russian versions, but no translations were published,” explains Andrey Zabrodsky, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, editor-in-chief of Zhurnal Tekhnicheskoy Fiziki, one of the oldest physics publications in Russia. Since last year, the institute has been publishing and distributing its own journals in English.
However, the problem is more serious. The fact is that the Russian-language versions of the journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences are published by a subsidiary of Pleiades publishing — ICC «Akademkniga». The new leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences obliged this company to submit finished articles in Russian for placement on the website of the Russian Center for Scientific Information (former RFBR), but the matter stalled. «The situation is paradoxical: English versions are coming out, but Russian versions are not available this year,» says Academician Khokhlov.
The impact of sanctions
«In order to gain recognition in your field, you need to publish in leading journals. In this sense, we do not divide them into «western» and «eastern». >»Traditions of publishing articles based on the results of fundamental research in foreign journals will remain,» Olga Kirillova also believes.
Initially, it seemed that the most serious obstacle to publishing in leading journals was American sanctions, which fall under some Russian institutes and universities. But the restrictions do not work in a strange way: articles by Russian scientists continue to be published in the most prestigious Western journals. So, compared to last year, the number of articles from Russia in the Springer Nature publishing house even increased, now it is about 12 percent. More often published only in Elsevier and MDPI. For several years now, the main co-authors of the Russians have been the Chinese and Indians, now their share has increased dramatically, that is, there is a reorientation towards the East.
Due to the fact that Russia was disconnected from Web of Science and Scopus, a course has been taken to develop a domestic system for assessing the quality of scientific research. Since the 2000s, the elibrary.ru database has been operating in Russia, where all scientific publications published in the country are listed — there are about six thousand of them, and a huge array of foreign periodicals has been indexed. An academic list of the Russian Science Citation Index of a thousand selected publications and a «white list» of the Ministry of Education and Science of 30,000 titles have been created. In addition, the state will encourage publications in domestic publications with the help of a multiplier.
In general, Russian scientists have no problem with where to publish the article. But maintaining subscriptions to leading foreign publications is critically important, and this is just under threat. Academician Aleksey Khokhlov warns: «Scientists mainly used international databases to set the task correctly, to carefully look at what other researchers have done in this narrow area, to make sure that their idea is original, to choose research methods, to study articles describing these methods.» At the same time, the Sci-Hub project, which for a long time fed domestic science, and even foreign science, will not save now — it has not been updated for two years. Closing access to world scientific literature will make it more difficult for Russian specialists to compete even with their Eastern counterparts.
According to experts, it is also necessary to solve problems with scientists' access to artificial intelligence systems, which are already actively used to obtain scientific results , writing articles and reviewing.