The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world of scientific publications: rapid publication and simplified access for articles about the virus, the jump in popularity of preprints, open access to scientific publications for a time of self-isolation in the world and in Russia. There is an impressive difference between the number of readers for Russian scientific articles in open access and in paid access. The paradox of the lack of open access to the journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences. CyberLeninka is a scientific electronic library based on the open science paradigm. Impressive growth in readership of CyberLeninka: 52 million readers in 2019, 250 million articles read. Online meeting of the dissertation council. eLibrary news: opening the API, but no direct access to the list of publications that cite this topic. Comprehensive publication activity score from the Ministry of education and science: stifling Russian scientific journals, lowering the prestige of monographs, ignoring newly emerging journals.
Apparently, the most significant events of this year in the field of scientific
publications related to the COVID-19 pandemic. First of all, it is a vigorous response to the
need for the rapid exchange of scientific data about the virus. Almost all publications
about COVID-19 quickly became publicly available, regardless of the policy pursued
by the publishers. Worldwide, the period for reviewing scientific papers on
COVID19 has been reduced by more than half (with a very slight slowdown in reviewing
other articles) [
Preprints, where authors published the most urgent scientific reports, found a new
breath. The number of preprints produced has increased many times. The operational
information that became available in this way proved extremely popular: the number
of requests to individual relevant preprints reached up to 4 million. The publishers'
attitude to preprints is becoming increasingly positive for a long time [
Over the past few years, leading scientific journal publishers have opened Preprint
servers for their authors: Springer – Research Square [
Since the quarantine, scientific and educational institutions' employees lost access
to their libraries with having a subscription to many journals. Journal publishers
opened free online access to their publications for this time. However, the transition
of the EU world of scientific publications to universal open access, which was
promised according to plan "S" for 2021, has once again been postponed for at least a year,
but rather until 2024 [
The Russian Academy of Sciences did not stay away from the covid-19 mass
movement towards open access. At the time of the self-isolation regime announced in
the spring, free access to 138 journals published by the Russian Academy of Sciences
was opened [
Here, once again, the deficiencies of the Russian Academy of Sciences' journal policy, which still focuses on paid access to full texts of articles, was clearly shown. I will illustrate this with the fate of three of my recent articles on related topics.
The first article [
The second article [
Finally, the third (chronologically first) article [
Why don't scientists read magazines published by the Russian Academy of Sciences? Of course, the point is not only and not so much in the reluctance to part with 250 rubles – the amount is not so terrible. The process of transferring money makes them stay away because they will have to report some personal data in the course. We also note that during the free access, the readers faced many obstacles. In particular, they were hindered by the sluggish notification of short-term access, the mandatory registration, and the inability to save a direct link to the article's full text. Thus, it is understandable that the number of readers who managed to get to the full texts of articles in academic publications turned out to be 10,000 times or 100,000 times less than those who read such an article in the public domain.
The priorities of the RAS remain unclear. The unavailability of "Programming" can still be explained by the Russian Academy of Sciences' usual disdain for the IT industry. But "Herald of the RAS" – the flagship publication of the Academy. Why was it necessary to make his materials practically inaccessible to the general reader? You are completely perplexed if you remember that all this is happening against the background of regular meetings of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Presidium dedicated to the popularization of science. Unfortunately, the future of open access to academic publications also raises serious concerns: the existence of the European plan "S" continues to be overlooked in academic circles.
But the popularization of scientific results is widely in demand in our country.
Cyberleninka open access repository (cyberleninka.ru) in 2019 showed explosive
growth in the audience, which reached 52 million people – 80% more than a year
earlier. In total, 250 million articles were read by Cyberleninka users in a year, which
indicates a massive request for scientific knowledge [
And another event in the scientific world caused by COVID-19. In May 2020, the
Russian Federation government issued a decree on the procedure for defending a
dissertation during a pandemic [
Of course, if some members of the dissertation Council secretly vote in person, and
some remotely, then during the counting of votes, the preferences of both parts
become known, which could only be attributed to a classic secret vote with some
stretch. However, no one prevents everyone, including full-time participants, from
secretly voting, say, through the mechanism provided by Zoom [
Several events of the past year in the field of scientific publications are related to
eLibrary (elibrary.ru). In the fall of 2019, peer-reviewed publications indexed in the
RSCI received a message about the possibility of transferring reviews to eLibrary.
The publisher was given the freedom to choose the mode: by its decision, the
submitted reviews could be published or not published in eLibrary with or without the
reviewer's indication. Open reviews are a powerful modern trend, and if the eLibrary
initiative in this form takes root on Russian soil, the world of Russian scientific
publications will become richer and more interesting.
Then eLibrary announced [
The list of works that cite this publication is not included in the bibliographic indicators available via this API. But this list is one of the most popular types of bibliographic information for readers; it allows you to get the latest information about the scientific direction under consideration. This list is generated by eLibrary and is available on the corresponding page of the site for an authorized user of eLibrary (Fig. 1 – List of citing publications in eLibrary). Still, for some reason, the list was not included in the API.
This circumstance significantly impoverishes the content of the publication card of the Russian scientific article. Card developers are forced to limit themselves to information provided by foreign bibliographic databases.
For example, if a hyperlink of the following type is included in the article card https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=link:https://keldysh.ru/gorbunov/duty.htm where the part written after the "link:" prefix is the URL of the cited article, the reader can go to the list of publications quoting this article in one click, according to Google Scholar data (Fig. 2). A similar construction exists for the Web of Science bibliographic database, but here it is necessary to specify as a parameter the number ("Accession Number") assigned to the article in this database. It is somewhat more complicated, but it is still possible to create such a list for the Crossref bibliographic database (using a special API). And the only eLibrary, for some reason, did not include this useful feature in its opened API. 5
In conclusion, a few words about vigorously discussed [
First, the method leads to the suffocation of Russian scientific journals that, due to obvious inertia, have positions in the Web of Science rating that do not correspond to their real scientific weight. The most powerful authors are forced to refuse to publish in such journals because of the scanty points of the IPPS. But without strong articles, magazines will never make it to the grandees of the rating. Nevertheless, it is easy to help Russian journals get back on their feet: it would be enough to keep the current methodology for calculating the IPPS and count the quartile Q of the Russian journal using the formula "Q=W–2", where W is the quartile of the journal in the Web of Science rating. However, the proposal for an even weaker "W-1" formula did not receive the support of decision-making officials. Secondly, the monograph assessment, which equates it to the publication of an article in an ordinary journal from Scopus, sounds simply ridiculous and humiliating for a serious scientist. Unfortunately, Russian officials have been bullying monographs for many years, either not recognizing them as a scientific result at all or charging insignificant points for a monograph that do not reflect either the work spent on writing it or the benefits it brings to science. The results of this policy are deplorable. For example, employees of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences published more than 20 monographs in 2006 and only two in 2019.
There is another, rarely mentioned argument of the IPPS critics. The most relevant science areas from time to time cease to be satisfied with the established community of journals. A new journal is then created, where the most powerful works in the new current direction are immediately directed and where the reader's interest will first be directed. However, the Russian scientist is cut off from this extremely popular stream from such a magazine. After all, according to the existing rules, the magazine will win the formal high positions required by the Ministry in the Web of Science rating only in a few years, and all these years, the KBPR will mindlessly and mechanically prevent Russian researchers from publishing there.