Journals that publish in Russian also use... what other languages?

Research Cooperative
02/03/13 02:09:11PM
@chief-admin

Here is a quick survey based on 39 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, after searching for "Russian":

In the first 39 of 131 open-access journals listed with Russian as a language, I found the following:

Published in Russia

Only Russian - 7 journals

Russian and the following:

English - 3 journals

German - 1 journal

Published outside Russia

Only Russian - 1 journal.

Russian and the following:

Bulgarian - 2, Czech - 1, Chinese - 1

English - 24, Estonian - 1, French - 9

Georgian - 2, German - 7, Hungarian - 2

Italian - 2, Latvian - 1, Lithuanian - 1

Polish - 3, Romanian - 1, Serbian - 2

Slovakian - 1, Spanish - 2, Ukrainian - 5

Conclusions:

(1) Most open access journals that use Russian are published outside Russia. This further suggests that access to Russian literature published inside Russia is still mainly through print journals held by libraries.

(2) Journals outside Russia may attract Russian-language contributions from authors living in Russia because they are open access, at the expense of local Russian journals.

(3) A wider range of topics may be published in Russian outside Russia in journals that also publish English, French, German, or Ukranian (languages often appear alongside Russian).

Comment:

(1) It is possible that there are many open access journals in Russia, but that they have not bothered to register with international directories such as DOAJ. If this is because it is assumed that no-one outside Russia reads Russian, they might be wrong. There are clearly many journals outside Russia that Publish in Russian as well as other languages.

(2) It might be good if journal publishers in Russia can be persuaded to register their journals in international directories, in order to make their work more accessible to Russian speakers world-wide.