Russia has compiled lists of scientific journals and publications that can be counted by scientists in their reports to their employers or grantors.

AK*

Photo: In the 2010s, the widespread introduction of foreign databases played an exceptionally positive role in the recovery of Russian science. Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

“Publish or Perish“

The “publish or perish” dilemma is not exclusive to Russia. The debate as to how publication frequency affects academic freedom continues to this day.

In Russia in particular, we can note how this dilemma, combined with harsh administrative pressure, has a detrimental impact on academic freedom and academic integrity. This challenge became especially acute after February 2022.

Despite the difficulties publishing in international journals, including in “unfriendly countries,” that became evident after the start of the full-scale aggression, there remains a requirement to publish in international journals and with international organizations. This creates a certain tension, especially as the state begins to actively interfere in academic policy**.

**This reflects the state of affairs as of autumn 2024.

“White List”

The Russian government has repeatedly stated its intention to independently compile a “white list” indicating those scientific journals in which scientists can publish that can be counted in their reports to their employer or grantor. Such import-substitution is associated both with the general policy of the country’s president (isolationism and military confrontation with First World countries) and with the fact that such platforms as Clarivate Web of Science (WoS, USA) and Elsevier Scopus (Netherlands) closed access to their databases for Russian organizations in 2022-2023.

Before the full-scale war with Ukraine began in 2022, Russian researchers would be evaluated on publications in journals indexed in WoS and Scopus. At that time, different organizations practiced various types of whitelisting. Some only counted publications in journals in the first and second quartiles of WoS/Scopus. Others counted all publications, even journals that were part of RSCI WoS (a list of Russian journals that were candidates for inclusion in the “full-fledged WoS,” i.e., the WoS Core Collection).

At one time, the HSE wanted to abandon Scopus altogether (due to the excessively large share of junk journals and the sometimes-incorrect division of quartiles). Alas, HSE scientists managed to block this change (after all, nearly all Russians are interested in the fictitious journal system).

In the 2010s, the widespread introduction of foreign databases played an exceptionally positive role in the recovery of Russian science. WoS and Scopus served as an external expert review for a system that was highly corrupt and incapable of evaluating itself.

Of course, Russian scientists and journal-publishers quickly developed various mechanisms to cheat straightforward scientometrics based on quartiles. But compared to the situation in the 2000s, it is difficult to overestimate the positive effect of using foreign databases as a benchmark.

The Sovereign White List

The first versions of a “sovereign” white list of journals (WL) were published in 2022. In 2023-2024, the WL began to be deployed as an evaluation criterion in scientific organizations.

The current version of the WL can be found on the official website of the RCNI.

To be honest, I expected the worst from the WL, both because of the general socio-political situation in Russia and because the experts invited to join the interdepartmental group responsible for developing the list were not the most hard-hitting critics. For example, there were suggestions that the WL should simply be based on the VAK list (where the share of trashy Russian journals exceeds the share of journals trying to be decent).

However, the reality (since mid-2024) has proved much better than expected. Today, the WL is comprised of the journals of WoS Core Collection, Scopus, and RSCI WoS—a total of about 30,000 journals, most of them foreign. However, Russian publishers are also well represented (there are about 2,000 Russian journals on the WL).

A completely unexpected but pleasant bonus: according to rumors, some weak journals included in the WoS Emerging Sources Citation Index were excluded from the WL.

How Journals are Evaluated

As before, journals on the 2024 WL are divided into quartiles (described in official documents as “four categories”). Currently, quartiles are calculated using the RCNI database, which is based on open data from the Crossref and OpenAlex projects and, in general, provides a more or less adequate ranking of journals by their level of scientific impact (citation numbers).

There is some concern that Russian publications are being given extra points, pushing them up the quartile rankings.

But overall, this is a trifle compared to what could have come out of the WL project had it not been for the efforts of a number of honest people in the interdepartmental working group of the Ministry of Education and Science.

The 2024 “sovereign” WL is functionally the same as its pre-war peers. The journals are almost the same, and the quartiles are quite close to the original WoS and Scopus ones.

The Story of Elsevier

There is, however, one other curious circumstance. The interdepartmental working group to develop the White List of July 7, 2024 (protocol DS/25-pr) excluded about 480 journals of the large publishing house Elsevier from the WL, namely fully Open Access journals, which charge authors an article processing charge (APC) for publication.

This is due to the fact that Elsevier announced in 2024 that the money received from Russia for OA publication would be used to support Ukraine. In 2024, Elsevier placed the following notification on some OA articles written with the participation of Russian authors.

Several points should be clarified here:

1. There is no information (at least that I’ve seen) that Elsevier helps the Ukrainian army or security forces. The now-very-popular rumors that Elsevier donates to the Ukrainian Armed Forces via Open Access apparently remain an urban legend.
2. In the spring of 2022, Elsevier issued a statement in support of Ukraine, in which it announced that it would only be donating humanitarian financial aid, not military aid.
3. It is unclear how authors in Russia could pay to publish in Open Access. No Russian grant funds will do this; it is also impossible to transfer money to an Elsevier account from Russia privately due to banking sanctions.
4. Russian authors publish in Elsevier’s OA journals relatively rarely. Their financial contribution is pennies in terms of the state budget.
5. Elsevier will remove this label from an article if the author requests it.
6. A Google search for the text of this banner does not yield any results, and a random check of recent articles by Russian authors in OA journals showed that the banner was not there. Most likely, Elsevier immediately abandoned this banner and no longer uses it.
7. I suspect that Elsevier’s declaration is a PR move by this purely commercial publishing giant and that there will in reality be no payments to Ukraine dependent on the citizenship of the authors.

Partial Open Access

In addition to the 480 fully Open Access Elsevier journals that were excluded from the WL, 1,850 Elsevier journals that are only partially open have been tagged with a “Warning” label on the WL.

The partial open access model assumes that some of the articles in the issue are available to the reader in Open Access, and the publisher most likely charged the authors for publication (via Article Publishing Charges). However, this is not necessary; sometimes the article is posted as OA without a charge to the authors. Some articles are free for the authors to publish, but the reader must pay for access.

The result of all this confusion was that various Russian scientific authorities began to notify employees that they should not publish in Elsevier journals distributed in full or partial Open Access.

Incidentally, the list of journals excluded from the WL also included such high-ranking publications as those in the Lancet family.

In one way or another, some Russian scientific and educational institutions (for example, RANEPA) have already sent out warnings to their employees prohibiting publication in such Elsevier journals.

* * *

I am confident that, despite everything, articles by Russian authors will continue to appear in Elsevier journals with APC.

We will have to wait and see how academic authorities and law-enforcement agencies will react to these cases. Will scientific publications lead to criminal cases on financing terrorism, or at least to dismissals from scientific positions? Quite possibly.

*The author is in Russia and his name has been withheld for security reasons