=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2784/spaper04
|storemode=property
|title=Russian Scientific Publications for the COVID-19 Period
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2784/spaper04.pdf
|volume=Vol-2784
|authors=Mikhail Gorbunov-Posadov
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ssi/Gorbunov-Posadov20
}}
==Russian Scientific Publications for the COVID-19 Period==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2784/spaper04.pdf
Russian Scientific Publications for the COVID-19 Period
Mikhail Gorbunov-Posadov[0000-0002-7044-8287]
Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. Miusskaya sq., 4. Moscow, 125047, Russia
gorbunov@keldysh.ru
Abstract. 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 differ-
ence between the number of readers for Russian scientific articles in open ac-
cess 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 li-
brary 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 di-
rect access to the list of publications that cite this topic. Comprehensive publi-
cation activity score from the Ministry of education and science: stifling Rus-
sian scientific journals, lowering the prestige of monographs, ignoring newly
emerging journals.
Keywords: scientific publication, COVID-19, open access.
1 COVID-19
Apparently, the most significant events of this year in the field of scientific publica-
tions 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 COVID-
19 has been reduced by more than half (with a very slight slowdown in reviewing
other articles) [1].
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 [2–4]. The
coronavirus has only accelerated this process.
Over the past few years, leading scientific journal publishers have opened Preprint
servers for their authors: Springer – Research Square [5], Wiley – Under Review [6],
Elsevier – First Look [7]. In 2020, the Preprint server appeared in IEEE – TechRxiv
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
310
[8]. In 2016, a specialized Preprint service was offered in Crossref [9]. In particular,
Crossref membership was allowed for Preprint servers, and custom metadata was
implemented that reflects the researcher's workflow from Preprint to official publica-
tion.
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 prom-
ised according to plan "S" for 2021, has once again been postponed for at least a year,
but rather until 2024 [10, 11].
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 [12]. Such a short-term opening of access had already happened at the
end of 2018 when the Accounting chamber made a harsh remark to the Russian
Academy of Sciences, which receives budget funding for the publication of its jour-
nals and yet does not open free access to them.
2 Open Access in the Academy
Here, once again, the deficiencies of the Russian Academy of Sciences' journal poli-
cy, 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 [13] was published in the academic journal "Programming" in
2019. For six months of stay in paid access at the price of 220 rubles for download-
ing, it was purchased by two readers. By the time the coronavirus appeared, the article
was already partially outdated, and only 16 people had read it during the open access
period. Further, for unknown reasons, the article was completely denied access, now
it cannot be obtained even for money.
The second article [14] was published in the journal "Bulletin of the Russian Acad-
emy of Sciences" in 2020, on the eve of the coronavirus's appearance. Thus, free ac-
cess to it was opened almost immediately, and 50 people managed to read it for free.
Now the article is available for reading for 253 rubles, and, of course, the number of
readers is practically not growing.
Finally, the third (chronologically first) article [15] was published in 2018 in the
non-Russian Academy of Sciences publication "Troitsky variant – Nauka" and was
placed in the public domain. Its fate can be confidently attributed to the successful –
190 thousand visits.
Why don't scientists read magazines published by the Russian Academy of Scienc-
es? 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 regis-
311
tration, and the inability to save a direct link to the article's full text. Thus, it is under-
standable 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 dedi-
cated 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 [16]. Surprisingly, the publica-
tions of the RAS to this day stubbornly refused to use the trump card in the success of
Cyberleninka – open access to full texts of scientific publications.
3 Online Defense of Dissertation
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 [17]. During this time, it is allowed to conduct the
defense online, where up to two-thirds of the dissertation council members participate
in the meeting remotely. In this case, the voting is open: as always, the IT sector is
lagging in science – after all, Russia already has a successful experience of conduct-
ing responsible online secret voting on the draft amendments to the Constitution.
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 be-
come 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 [18], and such secret
voting is in no way inferior to face-to-face voting. It is not clear why officials did not
decide to legalize such a simple secret voting scheme but forced the dissertation
councils to so thoroughly break the key procedure for conducting the defense.
4 E-Library
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.
312
The publisher was given the freedom to choose the mode: by its decision, the submit-
ted reviews could be published or not published in eLibrary with or without the re-
viewer'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 publi-
cations will become richer and more interesting.
Fig. 1. List of citing publications in eLibrary.
313
Then eLibrary announced [19] the appearance API – an application programming
interface designed to implement automatic queries and extract information from the
eLibrary database. Unfortunately, the API's capabilities were not rich: you can only
use it to find out the bibliographic indicators of an individual author, a separate jour-
nal, and a separate publication.
The list of works that cite this publication is not included in the bibliographic indi-
cators available via this API. But this list is one of the most popular types of biblio-
graphic 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 infor-
mation 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 biblio-
graphic database, but here it is necessary to specify as a parameter the number ("Ac-
cession Number") assigned to the article in this database. It is somewhat more com-
plicated, but it is still possible to create such a list for the Crossref bibliographic data-
base (using a special API). And the only eLibrary, for some reason, did not include
this useful feature in its opened API.
5 Integrated Publication Performance Score
In conclusion, a few words about vigorously discussed [20] letter [21] from the
Ministry of education and science "on the methodology for calculating the integrated
publication performance score" (IPPS). The most significant two arguments of nu-
merous critics of this methodology.
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.
314
Fig. 2. Generated by Google Scholar list of publications citing the specified article.
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 insig-
nificant 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 ex-
ample, 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.
315
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 pre-
vent Russian researchers from publishing there.
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