Following up on the translated paper published in the journal Science Editor and Publisher, 2017, Iss. 2–4, “Article processing charges for open access publication – the situation for research intensive universities in the USA and Canada”, this paper is circling back to the topic of article processing charges. Publication models in reputable American and West European scientific journals are diverse, so a detailed analysis of authors’ financial responsibilities might be of interest to researchers and editors. Publication fees may include APCs, page/color charges, and other obligatory or voluntary charges, helping promote open access or cover publishing costs. For qualifying authors, the fees may be lowered or waived. As far as reputable journals are concerned, there should be no correlation between their peer review quality and authors’ ability to pay. No fees paid can guarantee publication, that is why authors should pay special attention to journal reputation instead of its financial model.

I believe that perversion in modern practice of the evaluation of our scientific performance happen by fault of us, bibliometricians, too, as bibliometricians were negligent and laze about the interpretation of indicators, about conceptions (e.g., “altmetrics,” a term that is devoid of attempts to reflect the nature of the “discipline”; the use of the term “metric” instead of “indicator” as a sign of overvalued diagnostic ambitions) and about terminology (e.g., the use of the terms “value” and “quality”, “usefulness” and “influence” as full synonyms). A bureaucrat–noticing all this in his own way and going into no details – comes to believe in “simplicity”, “obviousness” and “unicity” of bibliometric “diagnostics”. The consequence is “bibliometric illusions”. E.g. 1) “everything can be measured with one number!” (The result is  Hirschmania at the level of planetary psychosis. The Hirsch index acquired the status of a sacred cow among bureaucrats and of a Procrustean bed among scientists – at the same time.); 2) “the conclusions are obvious” (E.g. if the journal is not sufficiently cited, “it is necessary to oblige its authors to give appropriate references in each article”. And if the average good article of the natural science profile has at least 10 references, then this “should be a mandatory minimum norm”. Some of the world’s journals arbitrarily intervene in the structure of citations in the articles they receive! But forcedly falsified references are neither a means of information coupling, nor a bibliometric indicator.); 3) “if the bibliometric indicators adequately reflect the quality of the scientific product, it is necessary to oblige scientists to produce not a scientific product, but the corresponding values of indicators” (Many world’s journals are now looking not for “quality articles”, but for “articles that will not lower our impact factor”. Some methodological features might be mistaken for a consequence of “specific Belarusian (Ukrainian, etc.) conditions”, which “is fraught with the fall of our impact factor.”) As a result, there occurs a profanation of bibliometrics itself. This means of evaluation (which has never claimed the exclusivity of its status!) unwittingly turns into a repressive tool with a maximum claim to the truth of the estimates. At the same time, there is no understanding that it is impossible in principle to predict the reach of a certain value of bibliometric indicators. The use of bibliometric indicators not for their intended purposes automatically makes the evaluation parabibliometric. The power of these trends resembles a curse!

This article continues the topic of preparing and developing scholarly journals, which aim to reach the international level. A particular focus of the article is how journals can increase their impact in terms of citation indicators calculated by Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Aim. To investigate a relationship between WoS and Scopus scientometric indicators, the language of publications and the amount of English-language materials published in journals. Methods. An analysis of scholarly journals published in 23 countries was conducted using the Ulrich’s database. Their scientometric indicators were assessed using the data derived from Scopus. Results. The obtained results demonstrate a number of specific regularities. It is found, on the one hand, that the larger the country and the more journals it publishes, the fewer its journals publish the full text of their articles in English. On the other hand, the smaller the country and the fewer journals it publishes, the greater the proportion of journals that publish their content entirely in English. These results manifest the desire of larger countries to maintain their national language as the language of science, while smaller non-English speaking countries aim to achieve the international recognition by presenting the country’s scientific achievements in English. However, according to the analysed indicators, journals publishing their content in English are read and cited better. Those journals that publish their content entirely in the country’s national language show significantly lower levels of citation. The same trend is observed for both bilingual journals (those publishing articles either in the national or English languages or having a small number of English articles along with publications in the national language) and multilingual journals. Translated journals published by Pleiades or Springer and journals having two parallel versions (one in the national language and another in English) demonstrate approximately the same level of citation. Conclusion. Journals published in parallel versions are shown to perform better in terms of citation, largely because they cover both the national and English-speaking readership. Moreover, the use of certain technological tools permits the citations of both versions to be merged. A considerable attention is paid to the discussion of the RF state science policy with respect to measuring national scientific results and various ethical issues arising in this context.

This article reflects on the issue of preserving Russian as a national language at scholarly journals and promoting research outcomes of non-Anglophone authors at an international arena by expanding Englishlanguage contents of local journals. Potential approaches to overcoming disadvantages and poor visibility of Russian journals are explored. Publishing English-only journals is advantageous for international recognition and indexing by global databases. However, that language model may have certain disadvantages in terms of information distribution. The optimal proposed solution could be the publication of Russian and English parallel versions of the journal, identical in the contents, metadata, article information, and identifiers, such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Examples of successful bilingual journals are provided.

This article deals with the acute problem of self-plagiarism in academic papers. Authors believe that illegitimate text recycling should be considered as a form of unethical behavior in science. Authors describe various methods of self-plagiarism, which have become widespread in the Russian and foreign publishing practice, and consider the criteria allowing to distinguish legitimate text recycling from self-plagiarism. Authors investigate the problem of the text recycling restrictions depending on the genre of an academic paper in which the text of the author has been used for the first time and the genre of the academic paper in which it has been reused. With the information provided in this paper about operating principles of the Antiplagiat software which detects plagiarism, authors conclude that an expert has to analyze full report from the software so he can assess the use of the identified citations and self-citations.

One of the main conditions for the effective work of scientific periodicals’ founders and publishers is the knowledge of the legislation to their professional activities. However, analyzing the experience of colleagues in this field can be even more useful than studying regulations of the media. The author of this article, who has considerable experience in managing the department of issuing scientific publications, presents her own view on certain disputable situations related to executing legal requirements under the condition of the absence of special legal regulation. This information can help to avoid breaches and subsequent sanctions by regulatory authorities in issuing scientific printed periodicals.

The current statistic data on the open access (OA) journals and institutional repositories show some successes and increased awareness on OA in Asian countries. There are several concerns, however, in regards to the access and use of articles by researchers together with the continued increase of libraries’ expenditure for journals. In the present article we introduce five solutions in the global and local perspectives. OA2020 initiative is a global initiative to transform existing journals to OA. Although the practical process of OA2020 remains a challenge, the transformation will increase OA without significant increase of journals and budgets for publishing. The promotion of the local and Asian journals is the second big challenge. Because these local or Asian journals still have important roles in the local research community, they should keep current publishing model of OA at the low cost but with high quality and the better access. The restructuring of the current library budget is the third challenge. The budget for periodicals should be reduced and the saved budget can be used to pay articles processing charge for OA and for purchasing monographs. The fourth important issue is ‘the digital blind spot at the young unemployed and retired elderly’. These groups of poorly supported and potentially important researchers have to be considered as a priority issue to the policies on OA and scholarly knowledge. Lastly, we believe there should be different needs for other activities: optimization of the searchable database, governmental policy on open science and international cooperation on OA.

Something is wrong with science as there is an increasing amount of unreliable, manipulated and outright faked results appearing in the literature. Here I argue that this is a direct consequence of the pay-structure and the assessment system employed in academia and it could be remedied by changing hiring, advancement, and funding criteria. Scientists are paid below average relative to their level of education, unless they are at the top or can secure grants that allow for higher salaries. Positions and grants are mostly awarded based on bibliometric numbers. Consequently, there is a strong competition to accumulate numbers of papers, impact factors, and citations. Those who can increase their value efficiently will be rewarded and the accumulation of higher values will become easier (the Matthew effect). Higher bibliometric numbers can be obtained by unethical or questionable practices, which might tempt some people. If assessments did not employ bibliometric numbers, then these practices would not have a benefit, and would fade out. Throughout the text, data from Hungary, which are similar to data from elsewhere, supplement the argument.