The announcement by the world’s scientific journals to suspend services to Russian scientific organizations by blocking access to the Web of Science and Scopus scientific citation databases will not cause major difficulties for the Russian scientific community and will not have irreversible consequences. . This was reported by Kommersant in the Ministry of Education and Science.
It is recalled that on March 31, a notice was published suspending the sale of goods and services to organizations in Russia and Belarus. It has been signed by major scientific publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, IOP Publishers, Wolters Kluwer, ACS Publications, Brill Academic Publishers and others. Thus, Russian universities and scientific organizations are denied legal access to foreign scientific journals and databases (see Kommersant on April 4). Then Alexei Hohlov, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, estimated that Russia would lose 97.5% of the world’s scientific products distributed by subscription. Scientists called the publishers’ decision an “attempt to kill Russian science.” They see a way out of this situation as a shift to piracy and the illegal downloading of scientific journals.
The Ministry of Education and Science, together with the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (RFBR), which is the centralized subscriber to scientific journals and databases, is currently monitoring the situation and “making efforts to maintain access to key information resources for the scientific community. RFBR did not respond a week ago. However, at the end of last week, subscribers to foreign publications were still working, according to researchers at Kommersant.
At the same time, the Ministry of Education and Science, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the heads of the country’s major universities and research institutes are working to establish a national system for evaluating the effectiveness of research and development. In addition, Russia plans to set up its own international citation database, which will establish lists of scientific journals and countries (including countries participating in the BRICS and SCO), Kommersant told the Ministry of Education and Science. Variants of journal requirements, criteria for their inclusion or exclusion from the database are currently being discussed.
Read more in the material “Science-intensive technologies”.
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