The paper summarizes experience of the authors as peer-reviewers of more than 100 manuscripts in twelve Russian and foreign academic journals on Library and Information Science in the last seven years. Prepared peer-reviews were used for making a list of the most usual critical and special comments for each manuscript that were subsequently structured for the conducted analyzes. Typical issues accompanying the peer-review process are shown. Significant differences between the results of peer-review in Russian and foreign journals are detected: although the initial quality of newly submitted manuscripts is approximately equal, the final published versions in foreign journals addressed all critical and the majority of minor reviewers’ comments, while in Russian journals more than one third of final versions were published with critical gaps. We conclude about low interest in high quality peer reviews among both authors and editors-in-chief in Russian journals. Despite the limitations of the samples, the obtained findings can be useful when evaluating the current peer-review system in Russian academic journals on Library and Information Science.

Clear translation remains a major challenge to better communication and understanding of the international academic literature, despite advances in Machine Translation (MT). Automatic translation systems which captured the detail and the sense of any manuscript in any language for a reader from any other linguistic background would find global applications.
In this article, we discuss the current opportunities and constraints to the wider use of machine translation and computer-assisted human translation (CAT). At the present stage of technology development, these instruments offer a number of advantages to specialists working with scientific texts. These include the facility to skim and scan large amounts of information in foreign languages, and to act as digital dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias. Word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translation between many languages and scripts is now well advanced.
The availability of modern machine translation has therefore changed the work of specialist scientific translators, placing greater emphasis on more advanced text and sense editing skills. However, machine translation is still challenged by the nuances of language and culture from one society to another, particularly in the freestyle literature of the arts and humanities. Scientific papers are generally much more structured, but the quality of machine translation still largely depends on the quality of the source text. This varies considerably between different scientific disciplines and from one author to another.
The most advanced translation systems are making steady progress. It is timely to revisit traditional training programmes in the field of written translation to focus on the development of higher-level research competencies, such as terminology search, and so to make best use of evolving machine translation technologies.
More widely, we consider that there is a challenge across the higher education systems in all countries to develop a simple, clear and consistent “international” writing style to assist fast, reliable and low-cost machine translation and hence to advance mutual understanding across the global scientific literature.  

This article provides a short introduction to ORCID and discusses the value of ORCID to researchers, publishers and editors, and research institutions. Here we provide some data about current rates of ORCID adoption around the world and we cover how our different APIs can be used with the ORCID/ OJS plugin, and outline some concrete steps that both ORCID members and non-members can take to enable the ORCID/OJS plugins. 

Integration of Russian science into the world’s scientific community is an important task for the government, universities, research organizations, and researchers. The ORCID identifier (iD) is an efficient tool for promoting researchers and their works, building researchers’ personal brands and enhancing their reputation in the scientific community, as well as attributing authorship. Modern journals are increasingly requiring their contributors to provide an ORCID iD as a mandatory element of the author’s information. Russian researchers, possibly due to the low awareness about the benefits of ORCID, make some typical mistakes when registering and completing their ORCID records. This article provides a brief analysis of such mistakes and shows 1) how to correctly present a researcher’s published (preferred) name and how to indicate other names the researcher is known by; 2) what visibility modes ORCID provides to its users; 3) what data can be added to a researcher’s ORCID iD for improved discoverability and recognition. An example of a published article with a wrong ORCID iD is presented; all the resulting negative outcomes for the journal are discussed. The conclusion is made about the need to raise the awareness among the research community about the importance of full and correct ORCID profiles. Editors of scientific journals should ensure that the authors’ ORCID records are filled out correctly.

Most academic journals have a fairly consistent look: they are structured similarly, their text is divided into similar sections; for example, they have an abstract at the beginning of the manuscript, and their text is usually organized in two columns. There may be different reasons for this similarity, ranging from the need to contain publication costs by using less page space to conforming to an internationally well-accepted format that may be perceived as the hallmark of academic articles. We surveyed 37 medical journals founded before 1960 and looked for their change in format over time and how this was experienced by and explained to readers. We then discussed what recent research has shown about the effects of layout on reading, looking for further explanations as to why this format was so successful.

Retraction is one of the ways to filter low-quality academic publications. Over the last decade, the number of retracted articles from journals has been steadily growing around the world. Information about such articles can be found both on the websites of the retracting journals and in the databases that index these journals. In 2010, two doctors from the United States, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, created an Internet resource – Retraction Watch (RW), which concentrates information obtained as a result of investigations of ethical misconduct leading to retraction of articles. These investigations are conducted by the RW founders themselves, as well as by volunteers. Currently, RW contains information on over 24,000 retractions. The main violations include serious errors in methodology and calculations that lead to incorrect conclusions, manipulation of figures and data, plagiarism and self-citation, duplication of publications, etc. In its posts, RW considers unintentional mistakes, as well as deliberate fraud in order to obtain a position, degree or other benefit. Retractions can result in the withdrawal of academic degrees, dismissal from work, demotion, loss of authority among colleagues. RW posts are released daily and a cumulative RW issue – at the end of each week. The owners of the resource, having no outside funding, offer to subscribe to a paid resource or provide sponsorship assistance to those interested in maintaining and developing it. However, the resource is publicly available, and everyone can subscribe to mailing lists for free. Recent issues have focused on non-peerreviewed articles about COVID-19 that report erroneous scientific findings with possible serious implications for important decisions. In addition, Retraction Watch accumulates information on academic ethics from other sources. This article aims to describe a variety of ethical violations leading to retraction of articles and the consequences of retractions based on RW data. The sample of posts was drawn mainly from the 2021 RW issues.