- Three Recommendations for Action
- Structure of the Report
- Category A–C Targets: Content Assets, Publishing Production Pipelines, Platforms and Indexes
- Category D–F Targets: Corpus and Secondary Literature, Commercial and Educational Publishing, International Translation Gateways
- Valuation, Deal Structures and Risk Register
- Appendix: Data, Methods and Due Diligence Checklist
Executive Summary: Key Judgments and Recommendations
This report answers one question: at a moment when Russian academic publishing has decoupled from the global system, Chinese publishing institutions are accelerating their internationalization, and Chinese AI companies urgently need legally licensable corpus, which Russian targets are worth buying, in what form should they be bought, what are they worth, and where are the risks.
We have five core judgments.
First, Russia is not "another Japan," and transplanting Japan's conclusions wholesale would be a directional error. In 2023, Chinese authors published 813,000 journal papers, while journals hosted in China published only 45,100 — a domestic journal capacity rate of 5.55%, meaning only 1 paper in 18 stays at home. Japan's capacity rate is 33.64%, South Korea's 63.23%, while Russia's is 85.09%: Russian journals carry the overwhelming majority of Russian authors' output, a capacity rate 15.3 times China's. This means Russia does not lack "venues capable of carrying papers"; what it lacks is a route to international indexes and global markets. What this report therefore recommends buying is not "capacity" but three things: channels, backfile corpus, and private production pipelines — directionally similar to the Japan report's conclusion of "buy processes and data, not brands," but with entirely different asset types.
Second, content value and transferability are severely misaligned, and this is the most important structural feature of the Russian target market. Pleiades Publishing alone, with 3.8% of journals, holds 15.4% of Russian literature and 43.1% of citations; it is Russia's only content asset that is already highly consolidated and directly oriented to Western markets. But it is registered in the United States, so a Chinese acquirer would face dual exposure to OFAC and US foreign investment review, making it one of the most compliance-difficult targets in this report's scoring. Conversely, privately owned publishing service providers with clean title and low sanctions exposure (ECO-Vector, Media Sphere, Infra-M and others) are individually small, yet they can actually be transacted. The most valuable assets cannot be bought, and the assets that can be bought are not the most valuable — every deal design must start from this constraint.
Third, the correct reason to procure AI corpus is "licensability," not "Russian-language scarcity" — this conventional wisdom needs correcting. In CulturaX, Russian accounts for 11.69% (737.2 billion tokens), second only to English; in FineWeb2, Russian is the largest non-English language, with a token volume exceeding Chinese. What is genuinely scarce is high-quality Russian academic text that can be legally licensed and whose rights chain can be evidenced, together with Russian-language specialised literature that has long been absent from English-centric curated corpora. More critically, the text and data mining (TDM) exception introduced by Russia's 2026 Law No. 243-ФЗ applies only to "sovereign and national-scale large foundation models"; Chinese companies most likely cannot invoke it and must obtain express permission on a case-by-case basis. Treating "Russia already has a TDM exception" as a legal basis for training is the most dangerous misjudgment in this due diligence exercise.
Fourth, the real bottleneck is money, not approval. We downloaded the full official OFAC SDN dataset (19,390 entries) and compared it entry by entry: the Russian Academy of Sciences as a whole, Nauka, VINITI, eLibrary, CyberLeninka, Pleiades, ECO-Vector, Media Sphere and Infra-M are all undesignated; however, at least 26 RAS institutes have been designated with secondary-sanctions markers, and Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Saint Petersburg Mining University and Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas are likewise listed. The harder constraint sits on the funding side: VTB's Shanghai branch was added to the SDN list on 2024-06-12; although China-Russia local-currency settlement now exceeds 99%, roughly 70% of Chinese enterprises' profits in Russia remain trapped locally. At the same time, as of September 2026 there is no public case of any Chinese bank being formally penalised under EO 14114 — the risk is systemic and not yet materialised, and should not be exaggerated externally.
Fifth, the discipline mismatch is both an undervalued opportunity and a capability boundary that must be stated clearly. 50.2% of Russian journal literature is in the social sciences (including economics, business management, psychology, the humanities and law), and these are precisely the disciplines where China's capacity rate is lowest (social sciences 3.6%, economics 2.6%, business administration 1.5%, psychology 2.6%, arts and humanities 2.4%) — this is the closest-matching block. Conversely, Russia's journal volume in the natural sciences is very small (chemistry 2.6%, physics 1.9%, mathematics 1.6%), while China's capacity rates in physics (11.2%) and geosciences (9.8%) are in fact relatively the best. Buying into Russia cannot fill China's most frontier gaps; it can only fill the humanities and social sciences and clinical medicine.
1Three Recommendations for Action
Recommendation 1 (0–6 months, can start immediately): do compliance work first, then discuss the deal; make a non-controlling corpus licence the first move. Before approaching any target, complete three things: run look-through SDN screening on the target entity and all of its upstream shareholders; seek a preliminary read from the NDRC on whether "news and media" falls within the Catalogue of Sensitive Industries for Overseas Investment (this point determines whether the case goes through approval or filing, and is the watershed for the approval path in this case); and verify whether the target publisher also operates a registered СМИ (mass media), because Article 19.1 of the Mass Media Law imposes a 20% foreign-capital ceiling on registered media and transactions in breach are void. The recommended first transaction is a non-controlling data licensing pilot — preferably entering through the CC BY and CyberLeninka layer (the cleanest rights chain), at a scale of roughly 100,000 items, which both validates the processing pipeline and avoids triggering foreign investment review.
Recommendation 2 (6–18 months, seize the window): acquire one or two privately owned publishing service entities with clean title, and take over commissioned publishing for learned-society English-language journals. Russia's private academic publishing service providers (ECO-Vector, Media Sphere, Infra-M, INTERECONOM, Scientific Library and others) are the most actionable category in this report's scoring: single ownership, low sanctions exposure, a high backfile share (ECO-Vector 91.7%, Vladislav Ivanov 94.8%), and they are under pressure from a consecutive decline in the print market and subscriber attrition. At the same time, Russia's highest-impact journals (such as Russian Chemical Reviews and Laser Physics) are currently published under commission by Western publishers such as IOP Publishing — should those contracts terminate for sanctions or commercial reasons, Chinese publishers are among the few international publishers capable of taking them over immediately. This is an event-driven opportunity that requires building relationships and service capability in advance.
Recommendation 3 (18–36 months, build a moat): use backfile buyouts and platform embedding to create a sustainable supply of Russian-language corpus at the million-item scale. The defining feature of Russia's core content assets is an extremely high backfile share: Steklov Mathematical Institute 93.3%, Physics-Uspekhi 97.1%, ECO-Vector 91.7%, and the Russian Academy of Sciences as a whole 86.6%. A one-off buyout of such assets secures the complete corpus, with almost no subsequent editorial cost and no sanctions sensitivity around current publishing, making it the optimal form of corpus procurement. On that foundation, establish a data licensing framework with eLibrary/RSCI (more than 69 million documents in total, including more than 17.5 million full texts), ultimately forming "reusable processing capability plus an evidencable licensing chain."
Russian academic publishing is worth buying, but what should be bought is "assets that can clear compliance," not "the highest-value assets"; the most realistic path is "compliance first, then licensing, then pipelines, and finally backfiles," rather than an outright controlling acquisition. Being able to explain the rights chain clearly matters more than being able to pay a higher price.
2Structure of the Report
This report has five parts. Part One sets out the core judgments and recommendations for action. Part Two analyses the Category A–C targets (content assets, publishing production pipelines, platforms and indexes), 19 in total. Part Three analyses the Category D–F targets (corpus and secondary literature, commercial and educational publishing, international translation gateways), 14 in total. Part Four sets out the valuation, deal structures and risk register, including the EDP Sciences actual transaction price anchor, a feasibility ranking of six deal structures and the compliance floor. Part Five is the data appendix and methodology note.
All 33 targets use the same seven-dimension weighted scoring model: strategic leverage (17%), discipline-gap fit (17%), transferability (16%), AI-corpus value (18%), valuation and financials (9%), sanctions-compliance feasibility (15%), and integration and operations (8%). Sanctions compliance is broken out as a standalone dimension with a 15% weight, and this is the most important methodological difference between this report and the Japan and Ukraine reports — in Russia, compliance is not a risk footnote but the first variable determining whether a deal can be done at all.
3Category A–C Targets: Content Assets, Publishing Production Pipelines, Platforms and Indexes
This part analyses 22 targets across Categories A, B and C (11 in Category A, 8 in Category B, 3 in Category C). They correspond to three entirely different purchasing logics:
Category A (content assets) buys academic content and publishing rights that already exist, with value derived from backfile and brand; Category B (publishing production pipelines) buys the capability to produce content, with value derived from processes, journal relationships and stable cash flow; Category C (platforms and indexes) buys the entry point through which content is discovered and measured, with the highest strategic value but the lowest transferability.
The first step to understanding the Russian market is to see its extreme fragmentation. Russia has 1,733 Crossref members (Japan has 723), yet the top 5 account for only 11.4% of national DOIs and the top 100 for only 48.4%; of 3,261 journals, 2,106 (64.6%) do not even have an identifiable host institution. This is a market with "no leader" — the sole exception is Pleiades Publishing, which with 3.8% of journals holds 15.4% of the literature and 43.1% of citations.
The second structural fact that must be seen clearly is the inversion between scale and impact. By literature volume, 50.2% of Russian journals are in the social sciences; but by citations, Russia's strongest journals are almost all in chemistry, physics, materials and geosciences. This dictates two ways of buying Category A targets: buy natural-science flagship journals for "brand and global standing," and buy humanities, social-science and medical backfiles for "discipline-gap fit and corpus scale."
Category A · Content Assets
A1 Media Sphere Medical Journal Portfolio
Russian name: Издательство «Медиа Сфера»
Ownership status: private limited liability company (Moscow)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 5,584 items / 2 journals / 18,592 citations; 26,958 Crossref DOI records |
| Language | Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Medicine, cardiovascular, neurology, oncology |
| Impact metrics | One of the main publishers of Russia's core clinical medicine journals, with an average citation count markedly above the Russian average |
Rationale for acquisition: Medicine is the field where China's absolute gap is largest (122,000 items of output in 2023, of which only 4,588 were carried domestically); Russia's clinical medicine backfile is substantial, and the private owner is open to an equity discussion
Evidence chain: 26,958 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); average citations above the Russian mean (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.2 · discipline-gap fit 4.8 · transferability 4.4 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 3.6 → overall 4.056 (rank 1)
A2 ECO-Vector Journal Portfolio
Russian name: Эко-Вектор
Ownership status: private limited liability company (Saint Petersburg)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 30,836 items / 9 journals; 53,567 Crossref DOI records (91.7% backfile) |
| Language | Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Medicine, biology, chemistry |
| Impact metrics | One of Saint Petersburg's largest private academic publishing service providers, focused on medicine and the life sciences |
Rationale for acquisition: A privately owned entity with clean title, and one of the few Russian publishing service companies that can be acquired directly through an equity purchase; 91.7% is backfile, giving high corpus value
Evidence chain: Russia's third-largest Crossref member, with 53,567 DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); 91.7% is historical backfile (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.4 · discipline-gap fit 3.8 · transferability 4.6 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 4.0 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 4.002 (rank 2)
A3 Pleiades Publishing Journal Portfolio
Russian name: Pleiades Publishing, Inc.
Ownership status: privately held company, registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), not the United States; it provides English translation, publishing and Western distribution for approximately 125 Russian-language journals. It is in trademark and copyright litigation with the Ioffe Institute, having lost a cumulative total of more than RUB 460 million in 2025–2026
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 364,369 items / 1,662,421 citations / 125 journals / h-index up to 74; Crossref member 137, with 380,052 registered DOI records, the largest in the entire Russian system |
| Language | English (translated from Russian) |
| Disciplines | Chemistry, physics, materials, biology, geosciences |
| Impact metrics | Average of 4.56 citations per item, 2.80 times the average for Russian journals; a single entity concentrates 43.1% of Russian citations. But its only Western route — the distribution agreement with Springer Nature (approximately 200 Russian journals) — runs until December 2026, with renewal undecided |
Rationale for acquisition: This is Russia's only content asset that is already highly consolidated and directly oriented to Western markets; BVI registration means an equity transaction does not trigger US foreign investment review. But it is a pressure-driven window rather than a high-quality asset awaiting sale: litigation losses, the cessation of payments to Russian state institutions from 2022, and the imminent expiry of its Western route — only the combination of the three creates seller motivation. Negotiations must be completed before December 2026, otherwise the asset will be repriced
Evidence chain: Holds 15.4% of literature and 43.1% of citations with 3.8% of journals (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); Crossref member 137, with 380,052 registered DOI records, the largest in the entire Russian system (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); cumulative litigation losses against the Ioffe Institute exceed RUB 460 million (2025-04, 2025-10, 2026-01) (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); the Springer Nature distribution agreement expires in December 2026 with renewal undecided (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 5.0 · discipline-gap fit 3.4 · transferability 4.6 · AI-corpus value 4.8 · valuation and financials 3.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.6 · integration and operations 3.0 → overall 3.964 (rank 3)
A4 Russian Clinical Medicine Journal Cluster (long-tail collection)
Russian name: Клиническая медицина — совокупный портфель
Ownership status: dispersed across universities, learned societies and commercial publishers (REMEDIUM, SILICEA-POLIGRAF, the paediatrics publisher and others)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 34,226 items / 22 journals / 19,781 citations |
| Language | predominantly Russian |
| Disciplines | Medicine, cardiovascular, paediatrics, oncology, neurology |
| Impact metrics | Russian medical journals are numerous but individually small; the leaders are Russian Journal of Cardiology (h=50) and Meditsinskiy sovet (6,698 items) |
Rationale for acquisition: Obtained through "collective licensing + co-publishing," giving the lowest unit cost; Russian-language clinical experience corpus is extremely scarce for medical AI
Evidence chain: Medicine is one of the disciplines with China's lowest capacity rate (3.77%) (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); most Russian medical journals are DOAJ-certified and CC BY licensed (source: DOAJ API, Russian published journals and their licence information, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.8 · discipline-gap fit 5.0 · transferability 3.6 · AI-corpus value 4.8 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.6 · integration and operations 3.2 → overall 3.958 (rank 4)
A5 Physics-Uspekhi
Russian name: Успехи физических наук (УФН)
Ownership status: Lebedev Physical Institute (ФИАН, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences); the English edition is published by IOP Publishing
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 19,697 items / 93,646 citations / h-index 107; 19,602 Crossref DOI records, of which 19,041 (97.1%) are historical backfile |
| Language | Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Physics, theoretical physics |
| Impact metrics | h-index 107, the flagship of Russian-language physics reviews; but current output is extremely low (only 561 current Crossref items) |
Rationale for acquisition: A textbook "backfile-type" asset: 97% of the stock is historical literature, so a one-off buyout secures the complete corpus with almost no subsequent editorial cost and no sanctions sensitivity around current publishing
Evidence chain: 97.1% of DOIs are historical backfile (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); h-index 107, second in Russia (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 4.4 · discipline-gap fit 3.4 · transferability 3.2 · AI-corpus value 4.9 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.8 · integration and operations 3.8 → overall 3.840 (rank 8)
A6 Steklov Mathematical Institute Journal Cluster
Russian name: Математический институт им. В.А. Стеклова
Ownership status: Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (a state research institution; the entity itself cannot be acquired; journal publishing rights and backfile are negotiable)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 37,461 Crossref DOI records, of which 34,953 (93.3%) are historical backfile |
| Language | Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Mathematics |
| Impact metrics | Russian mathematics is a world-class school (Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Arnold, Sinai), and its journal backfile is an irreplaceable component of the global mathematics literature |
Rationale for acquisition: Mathematics is a discipline where China's gap multiple is moderate (17.5 times) but the strategic value is very high; the completeness and uniqueness of the Russian mathematics backfile far exceed the commercial value its scale suggests
Evidence chain: 93.3% is historical backfile, a purely backfile-type asset (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); Steklov is the fourth-largest DOI registrant in Russia (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 4.0 · discipline-gap fit 3.8 · transferability 2.8 · AI-corpus value 4.9 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.8 · integration and operations 3.6 → overall 3.760 (rank 12)
A7 Gramota Linguistics and Humanities Journal Cluster
Russian name: Издательство «Грамота»
Ownership status: private publishing house
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 16,268 items / 1 journal; 11,156 Crossref DOI records |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Linguistics, humanities, history |
| Impact metrics | Philology Theory & Practice alone accounts for 16,268 items, making it one of the largest humanities journals in Russia |
Rationale for acquisition: China's humanities and social-science capacity rate is extremely low (arts and humanities 2.38%, social sciences 3.58%), while Russian humanities journals are large in scale and offer distinctive Russian-language corpus
Evidence chain: 16,268 items in a single journal, first in Russian humanities (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.4 · discipline-gap fit 4.4 · transferability 3.8 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 4.2 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 3.0 → overall 3.744 (rank 14)
A8 Академиздатцентр «Наука» (Akademizdatcenter Nauka)
Russian name: Академиздатцентр «Наука»
Ownership status: state-owned publishing centre within the Russian Academy of Sciences system
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 20,669 items / 13 journals; 57,551 Crossref DOI records (83.8% backfile) |
| Language | predominantly Russian |
| Disciplines | Physics, chemistry, geosciences, biology |
| Impact metrics | Russia's oldest academic publishing house, carrying a large number of the Academy's traditional journals |
Rationale for acquisition: Russia's second-largest DOI registrant on Crossref; if a publishing mandate or joint venture can be agreed with RAS, it would give control of the publishing pipeline for Russian basic science
Evidence chain: 57,551 Crossref DOI records, second in Russia (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.6 · discipline-gap fit 3.6 · transferability 2.8 · AI-corpus value 4.2 · valuation and financials 4.0 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.8 · integration and operations 2.8 → overall 3.432 (rank 21)
A9 Russian Chemical Reviews
Russian name: Успехи химии
Ownership status: Russian Academy of Sciences (host institution); international publishing and distribution are handled by IOP Publishing
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 4,398 items / 118,353 citations / h-index 120 / two-year impact 7.27 |
| Language | Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Chemistry |
| Impact metrics | h-index 120 and a two-year impact factor measure of 7.27, making it Russia's highest-impact academic journal and a first-tier title among global chemistry review journals |
Rationale for acquisition: A single journal that constitutes a world-class brand. China's chemistry output is the world's largest but it lacks top-tier domestic titles; this journal is the only single-journal asset that can directly close the "global standing" gap in one transaction
Evidence chain: h-index 120 and two-year impact 7.27, first in Russia (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); published by IOP Publishing on behalf of RAS, a replicable contract structure (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 5.0 · discipline-gap fit 3.6 · transferability 2.6 · AI-corpus value 3.2 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.8 · integration and operations 2.8 → overall 3.422 (rank 22)
A10 Russian Academy of Sciences Directly Affiliated Journal Cluster
Russian name: Российская академия наук
Ownership status: Russian Academy of Sciences (a state institution; the entity itself cannot be acquired)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 79,189 items / 103 journals; 64,749 Crossref DOI records (86.6% backfile) |
| Language | predominantly Russian + English |
| Disciplines | Physics, chemistry, geosciences, biology, mathematics |
| Impact metrics | The national-team content source for Russian basic science, but its publishing functions are dispersed across Nauka, Pleiades, MAIK and other entities |
Rationale for acquisition: The entity itself cannot be bought, but it is the ultimate source of rights for the overwhelming majority of transferable assets; establishing a "content licensing + co-publishing" framework with RAS is the institutional precondition for every subsequent transaction
Evidence chain: Russia's largest DOI registrant on Crossref (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.8 · discipline-gap fit 3.6 · transferability 2.0 · AI-corpus value 4.2 · valuation and financials 4.0 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.2 · integration and operations 2.6 → overall 3.232 (rank 26)
A11 Mining and Geological Engineering Journal Cluster (Saint Petersburg Mining University and others)
Russian name: Горный журнал / Journal of Mining Institute
Ownership status: Saint Petersburg Mining University and other state universities
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 8,191 items / 1 journal / h-index 32 |
| Language | English + Russian |
| Disciplines | Mining, geology, energy engineering |
| Impact metrics | Journal of Mining Institute is DOAJ-certified with h=32, one of the few internationally visible Russian engineering titles |
Rationale for acquisition: China's engineering capacity rate is only 6.11% (207,000 items of output, 12,700 carried domestically); Russian mining and geological engineering practice literature has direct value for Chinese energy and mining enterprises
Evidence chain: DOAJ-certified, h-index 32 (source: DOAJ API, Russian published journals and their licence information, retrieved 2026-09); engineering is the discipline with China's largest absolute gap (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 1.8 · discipline-gap fit 4.6 · transferability 2.0 · AI-corpus value 4.0 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 1.6 · integration and operations 2.6 → overall 2.972 (rank 31)
Category B · Publishing Production Pipelines
B12 INTERECONOM Publishing
Russian name: Издательство «Интерэконом»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 21,042 Crossref DOI records (63.5% backfile) |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Economics, management |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 21,042 Crossref DOI records, of which 7,686 are current, making it one of Russia's most active commercial publishers. Economics and management are precisely the disciplines with China's lowest capacity rates (1.53% and 2.56%), so the fit is extremely high
Evidence chain: 21,042 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.4 · discipline-gap fit 4.6 · transferability 4.4 · AI-corpus value 4.0 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 3.900 (rank 5)
B13 Infra-M Academic Publishing House
Russian name: Издательский дом «ИНФРА-М»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 22,386 Crossref DOI records (80.4% backfile); 23,403 items / 37 journals on OpenAlex |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Economics, management, law, humanities |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 37 journals, 23,403 items of literature and 22,386 Crossref DOI records. One of Russia's largest combined academic and textbook publishing groups, with both journal and book assets
Evidence chain: 22,386 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.0 · discipline-gap fit 4.4 · transferability 4.0 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 3.8 → overall 3.888 (rank 6)
B14 Publishing House «Scientific Library»
Russian name: Издательство «Научная библиотека»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 19,073 Crossref DOI records (29.1% backfile); 14,030 items / 1 journal on OpenAlex |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Economics, management, social sciences |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 19,073 Crossref DOI records, of which 13,529 are current — the highest current flow in Russia, showing that its production pipeline is still running at full capacity. Buying it means buying "live capacity" rather than inventory
Evidence chain: 19,073 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.6 · discipline-gap fit 4.4 · transferability 4.4 · AI-corpus value 3.8 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.2 → overall 3.880 (rank 7)
B15 Private Enterprise, Vladislav Ivanov
Russian name: Приватный предприниматель Владислав Иванов
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 29,735 Crossref DOI records (94.8% backfile) |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Multidisciplinary |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 29,735 Crossref DOI records, 94.8% of them backfile. This "sole proprietorship" form of publishing service provider is an institutional phenomenon peculiar to Russia: ownership is extremely simple and there is a single beneficial owner, making it the easiest category of target to negotiate
Evidence chain: 29,735 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 3.4 · transferability 4.8 · AI-corpus value 4.2 · valuation and financials 4.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.2 → overall 3.796 (rank 10)
B16 The Publishing Group Jurist
Russian name: Издательская группа «Юрист»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 16,053 Crossref DOI records (41.7% backfile); 784 items / 1 journal on OpenAlex |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Law |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 16,053 Crossref DOI records, of which 9,362 are current. Law is the fifth-largest discipline by number of DOAJ certifications in Russia, while China's capacity rate in law and the social sciences is extremely low
Evidence chain: 16,053 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 4.2 · transferability 4.2 · AI-corpus value 4.0 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 3.766 (rank 11)
B17 Euroasian Scientific and Industrial Chamber, Ltd.
Russian name: Евразийская научно-промышленная палата
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 21,697 Crossref DOI records (72.5% backfile) |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Multidisciplinary, engineering, economics |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 21,697 Crossref DOI records, with 5,959 current registrations (a high level of activity). A publisher branded "Euroasian," naturally aligned with China's Belt and Road narrative
Evidence chain: 21,697 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.8 · discipline-gap fit 3.8 · transferability 4.2 · AI-corpus value 3.8 · valuation and financials 4.2 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 3.746 (rank 13)
B18 BIBLIO-GLOBUS Publishing House
Russian name: Издательство «БИБЛИО-ГЛОБУС»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 15,639 Crossref DOI records (71.5% backfile); 12,726 items / 21 journals on OpenAlex |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Economics, social sciences |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 15,639 Crossref DOI records, 21 journals and 12,726 items of literature
Evidence chain: 15,639 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 3.8 · transferability 4.2 · AI-corpus value 3.8 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 3.662 (rank 16)
B19 PANORAMA Publishing House
Russian name: Издательство «Панорама»
Ownership status: private enterprise / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | 15,536 Crossref DOI records (58.0% backfile) |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Social sciences, humanities |
| Impact metrics | A commercial publishing service provider whose value lies in its production pipeline, journal relationships and backfile stock |
Rationale for acquisition: 15,536 Crossref DOI records, of which 6,526 are current
Evidence chain: 15,536 Crossref DOI records (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 3.6 · transferability 4.2 · AI-corpus value 3.8 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.8 · integration and operations 4.0 → overall 3.628 (rank 18)
Category C · Platforms and Indexes
C20 CyberLeninka Open Access Platform
Russian name: КиберЛенинка
Ownership status: private limited liability company ООО «Итеос» (ИНН 7724761154). In 2017 Russian capital acquired 25% for RUB 30 million, implying an overall valuation of about RUB 120 million; the buyer publicly announced at the time that it was forming an "international investor consortium" and preparing a Series A round
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | OpenAlex indexes 1,220,700 items under the repository type; official figures are 3,400 journals and 3.15 million articles, published under CC BY as agreed with rights holders. Operationally loss-making for a long period (revenue RUB 18.1 million, net loss RUB 2.2 million) |
| Language | predominantly Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines |
| Impact metrics | The largest single aggregation point for Russian-language academic full text; positioned as open access, with high international visibility |
Rationale for acquisition: The only target on the entire list with a public pricing reference and whose counterparty has publicly stated it is seeking international capital cooperation: 25% was priced at RUB 30 million in 2017, the Series A has still not closed, and the entity keeps losing money. This is a genuinely "negotiable" target and the lowest-cost step into Russian-language open corpus
Evidence chain: 25% priced at RUB 30 million in 2017, implying an overall valuation of about RUB 120 million (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); official figures of 3,400 journals / 3.15 million articles, published under CC BY (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); the buyer publicly announced preparations for a Series A and an international investor consortium (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.0 · discipline-gap fit 3.4 · transferability 3.6 · AI-corpus value 4.8 · valuation and financials 4.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.4 · integration and operations 2.8 → overall 3.676 (rank 15)
C21 eLibrary.ru and РИНЦ (RSCI)
Russian name: eLibrary.ru / Российский индекс научного цитирования
Ownership status: ООО «Научная электронная библиотека» (a private limited liability company); RSCI was once hosted on Clarivate Web of Science
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | More than 69 million documents in total, including more than 17.5 million full texts and 12.3 million open-access items; in 2022, after Elsevier terminated its contract, it stopped integrating Scopus and switched to full integration of Crossref (more than 5 million records a year) |
| Language | predominantly Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines |
| Impact metrics | Russia's de facto "CNKI": both a full-text repository and an evaluation system, controlling the bibliometric infrastructure of Russian academic publishing |
Rationale for acquisition: The single target with the highest strategic value, but the database itself cannot be acquired: eLibrary's official documents state explicitly that "the RSCI database is entirely a Russian product, and all rights belong to the Russian Federation." The only negotiable element is the operating company ООО «Научная электронная библиотека». The realistic path is data licensing and technical cooperation, not an equity acquisition
Evidence chain: RSCI was once indexed and hosted by Clarivate, now terminated (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); official documents state that all rights to RSCI belong to the Russian Federation (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09); the operating company's revenue is RUB 267.2 million (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 4.6 · discipline-gap fit 4.0 · transferability 1.4 · AI-corpus value 4.8 · valuation and financials 3.0 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.2 · integration and operations 2.0 → overall 3.310 (rank 25)
C22 НЭБ and National Scientific Data Platform Cooperation
Russian name: Национальная электронная библиотека / государственная база научных данных
Ownership status: Russian state (culture and science authorities)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | A national digital library and a newly established scientific data platform, currently under construction |
| Language | predominantly Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines |
| Impact metrics | Russia is actively building national infrastructure to replace Western indexes, creating a window for technical cooperation |
Rationale for acquisition: The entity itself cannot be acquired, but it is the institutional entry point into the Russian system; entering through platform construction and technical services can be exchanged for priority on subsequent content licensing
Evidence chain: Russia is promoting the construction of a national scientific data platform (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.6 · discipline-gap fit 3.0 · transferability 2.0 · AI-corpus value 3.4 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.6 · integration and operations 2.4 → overall 2.960 (rank 32)
4Category D–F Targets: Corpus and Secondary Literature, Commercial and Educational Publishing, International Translation Gateways
This part analyses 11 targets across Categories D, E and F (4 in Category D, 4 in Category E and 3 in Category F). They answer three questions: where the corpus comes from, whether the educational market is worth entering, and whether the international channel can be taken over.
Category D (corpus and secondary literature) is the category this report weights most heavily on the AI-corpus dimension, but a popular false premise must first be corrected: Russian is not scarce in general web corpus. In CulturaX, Russian accounts for 11.69% (737.2 billion tokens), second only to English; in FineWeb2, Russian is the largest non-English language, with a token volume even exceeding Chinese. What is genuinely scarce is high-quality Russian academic text that can be legally licensed and whose rights chain can be evidenced — and Russian assets have a distinctive structure on precisely this point: extreme "backfiling."
The backfile share of Russia's core content assets is unusually high: of Physics-Uspekhi's (UFN) 19,602 DOI records, 97.1% is historical backfile; Steklov Mathematical Institute 93.3% of 37,461; ECO-Vector 91.7%; the Russian Academy of Sciences as a whole 86.6%. For corpus procurement, backfile-type assets are the optimal form: a one-off buyout secures the complete corpus, with almost no subsequent editorial cost and no sanctions sensitivity around current publishing.
Category E (commercial and educational publishing) derives its value not from journal brands but from university channels and teaching corpus — Russia's largest textbook and e-library platforms (Лань, Юрайт, ГЭОТАР-Медиа, КНОРУС) reach hundreds of universities and sit precisely on several of the disciplines where China's capacity rate is lowest.
Category F (international translation gateways) is the most direct channel for "buying a brand in exchange for international standing": Pleiades and MAIK translate Russian-language journals into English and distribute them in the West. But this category is also the most tightly constrained by Western contracts and sanctions, and represents a classic event-driven opportunity — the opportunity comes from others exiting, not from a proactive sale.
Category D · Corpus and Secondary Literature
D1 The ГОСТ Standards System and Russian Technical Specifications
Russian name: Росстандарт / ГОСТ
Ownership status: Russian state (Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | More than 33,000 current ГОСТ standards (2017 basis), with the Soviet-era share already down from 75% to 43%; protected by copyright, full text is paid for, and official channels offer a dedicated licence agreement |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Engineering, materials, industry |
| Impact metrics | Standards text is the most terminologically standardised and structurally repetitive part of engineering corpus |
Rationale for acquisition: Highly relevant to engineering discipline-gap fit (China's capacity rate 6.11%) and of significant value for engineering AI models; the acquisition path is intergovernmental standardisation cooperation
Evidence chain: National standards system (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.4 · discipline-gap fit 4.0 · transferability 2.0 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.0 · integration and operations 2.4 → overall 3.184 (rank 27)
D2 Rospatent / ФИПС Patent Literature Database
Russian name: Роспатент / ФИПС
Ownership status: Russian state (Federal Service for Intellectual Property)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Nearly 3 million patents registered cumulatively over the agency's 70 years, and 1 million protected brands; it operates the "Открытые реестры" open register, and international patent documents can be exchanged in bulk via FTP |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | All technical fields |
| Impact metrics | Patent text is the most regularly structured and most terminology-dense category of technical corpus |
Rationale for acquisition: High technical-corpus value for Chinese AI companies, and the public nature of patent literature makes the licensing path relatively clear; but it is state data, requiring intergovernmental cooperation rather than a commercial acquisition
Evidence chain: National intellectual property database (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.8 · discipline-gap fit 3.0 · transferability 2.2 · AI-corpus value 4.6 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.0 · integration and operations 2.6 → overall 3.166 (rank 28)
D3 Russian Dissertation (Candidate of Sciences / Doctor of Sciences) Repository
Russian name: Диссертации (кандидатские и докторские)
Ownership status: dispersed across universities, the Russian State Library (РГБ) and the electronic dissertation library
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | The Russian State Library has preserved the originals of the country's dissertations since 1944, more than 1 million items (candidate and doctoral dissertations and their abstracts); the electronic library offers only search and reading-room access, not open bulk download |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines |
| Impact metrics | Dissertations are long-form, systematic and terminology-dense corpus, of a type that barely exists in general web corpus |
Rationale for acquisition: A scarce source of long-form Russian academic corpus; obtaining it requires institution-by-institution negotiation, making it suitable as a supplementary layer within a portfolio
Evidence chain: РГБ legal deposit (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 3.2 · transferability 2.6 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.0 · integration and operations 2.4 → overall 3.110 (rank 29)
D4 ВИНИТИ РАН Secondary Literature and Abstract Database
Russian name: Всероссийский институт научной и технической информации
Ownership status: Russian Academy of Sciences system (a state institution)
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Adds about 600,000 documents a year across 26 subject sections and more than 180 categories, including bibliographic records, keywords, classification codes and abstracts of the original literature; it has published the Abstract Journal (Referativnyi Zhurnal) since 1952, with the electronic database dating from 1981. But only 3,652 DOI records are registered with Crossref, and the Abstract Journal archive since 1952 has not yet been digitised into transactable corpus |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines (mainly science and engineering) |
| Impact metrics | One of the world's largest and longest-running Russian-language secondary literature systems — structured, human-processed scarce corpus rather than raw web text |
Rationale for acquisition: The "crown-jewel asset" on the AI-corpus dimension: abstract text is high quality, regularly structured and fully discipline-tagged, with strong Russian-language exclusivity. The obstacles are state ownership and an opaque rights chain, requiring entry through licensing rather than acquisition
Evidence chain: Continuous publication since 1952 (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.8 · discipline-gap fit 3.2 · transferability 1.8 · AI-corpus value 4.2 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.0 · integration and operations 2.2 → overall 3.014 (rank 30)
Category E · Commercial and Educational Publishing
E5 ГЭОТАР-Медиа (GEOTAR-Media)
Russian name: Издательская группа «ГЭОТАР-Медиа»
Ownership status: private company / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Mainly books and teaching resources rather than journal literature; exact scale is subject to company disclosure |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Medicine, pharmacy, teaching |
| Impact metrics | Value lies in university channels, teaching corpus and stable cash flow, not in journal brands |
Rationale for acquisition: Russia's largest medical specialist publisher and the market leader in medical textbooks and clinical guidelines. Russian-language medical textbook corpus is extremely valuable for medical AI and matches the medical gap
Evidence chain: Russian education and academic publishing platform (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.8 · discipline-gap fit 4.6 · transferability 3.8 · AI-corpus value 4.4 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.6 · integration and operations 3.4 → overall 3.812 (rank 9)
E6 Лань (Lan) E-book Platform
Russian name: ЭБС «Лань»
Ownership status: private company / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Mainly books and teaching resources rather than journal literature; exact scale is subject to company disclosure |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines, teaching |
| Impact metrics | Value lies in university channels, teaching corpus and stable cash flow, not in journal brands |
Rationale for acquisition: One of Russia's largest university e-library systems (ЭБС), covering teaching and academic content for hundreds of universities. Buying it means buying university channels and teaching corpus, not journals
Evidence chain: Russian education and academic publishing platform (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.0 · discipline-gap fit 3.8 · transferability 4.0 · AI-corpus value 4.0 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.6 · integration and operations 3.2 → overall 3.654 (rank 17)
E7 Юрайт (Yurait) E-book and Teaching Platform
Russian name: Образовательная платформа «Юрайт»
Ownership status: private company / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Mainly books and teaching resources rather than journal literature; exact scale is subject to company disclosure |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | All disciplines, teaching |
| Impact metrics | Value lies in university channels, teaching corpus and stable cash flow, not in journal brands |
Rationale for acquisition: One of Russia's leading educational publishing and online learning platforms, with a substantial stock of textbooks and course content. Textbook text is regularly structured and a source of high-quality teaching corpus
Evidence chain: Russian education and academic publishing platform (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.6 · discipline-gap fit 3.6 · transferability 3.6 · AI-corpus value 4.0 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.6 · integration and operations 3.4 → overall 3.486 (rank 19)
E8 КНОРУС / Проспект Textbook Cluster
Russian name: КНОРУС / Проспект
Ownership status: private company / limited liability company
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Mainly books and teaching resources rather than journal literature; exact scale is subject to company disclosure |
| Language | Russian |
| Disciplines | Economics, law, humanities, teaching |
| Impact metrics | Value lies in university channels, teaching corpus and stable cash flow, not in journal brands |
Rationale for acquisition: The main publisher of Russian university textbooks in economics, law and the humanities. It corresponds to the three disciplines with China's lowest capacity rates (business administration 1.53%, economics 2.56%, law-related social sciences 3.58%)
Evidence chain: Russian education and academic publishing platform (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.2 · discipline-gap fit 4.2 · transferability 3.6 · AI-corpus value 3.8 · valuation and financials 3.8 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.6 · integration and operations 3.0 → overall 3.470 (rank 20)
Category F · International Translation Gateways
F9 Allerton Press Translation Contracts
Russian name: Allerton Press, Inc.
Ownership status: US private company, undertaking English translation and distribution of some Russian-language journals
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | Mainly commissioned translation contracts, small and fragmented in scale |
| Language | English (translated from Russian) |
| Disciplines | Physics, chemistry, engineering |
| Impact metrics | A third-tier translation channel with limited value per deal |
Rationale for acquisition: Can be obtained as a supplementary clause in a Pleiades / MAIK transaction and should not be pursued as a standalone project
Evidence chain: One of the translators of English editions of Russian journals (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 3.4 · discipline-gap fit 3.0 · transferability 3.6 · AI-corpus value 3.4 · valuation and financials 4.4 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.6 · integration and operations 3.4 → overall 3.334 (rank 23)
F10 Russian Journal Commission Contracts Held by IOP Publishing
Russian name: Контракты IOP Publishing с российскими журналами
Ownership status: IOP Publishing (a UK learned-society publisher) publishes under commission; rights remain with the Russian host institutions
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | OpenAlex indexes 3 journals, 9,254 items and 62,702 citations (including Russian Chemical Reviews and Laser Physics) |
| Language | English |
| Disciplines | Chemistry, physics |
| Impact metrics | It holds the commission for Russia's two highest-impact journals, so the contract value is extremely high |
Rationale for acquisition: This is a "replacement opportunity after contract expiry": should IOP exit for sanctions or commercial reasons, Chinese publishers are among the few international publishers capable of taking over immediately. An event-driven opportunity
Evidence chain: Russian Chemical Reviews h=120, Laser Physics h=60 (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 4.6 · discipline-gap fit 3.2 · transferability 3.0 · AI-corpus value 3.6 · valuation and financials 3.6 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 2.2 · integration and operations 2.8 → overall 3.332 (rank 24)
F11 MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica
Russian name: МАИК «Наука/Интерпериодика»
Ownership status: private / cooperative translation publishing body (closely connected to the Russian Academy of Sciences system). It no longer has any journals or member record on Crossref; its function has effectively ceased to exist
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Corpus / asset scale | OpenAlex historical records show 16,211 items / 14 journals (historical stock); but there is no longer any corresponding member or journal record in current Crossref registrations |
| Language | English (translated from Russian) |
| Disciplines | Physics, chemistry, biology, geosciences |
| Impact metrics | Once the second-largest export channel for English editions of Russian journals, far smaller than Pleiades; it has now disappeared from the DOI infrastructure |
Rationale for acquisition: This report downgrades it from a "parallel channel" to a "historical stock": a translator that no longer exists in Crossref can neither take on current publishing nor be acquired as a going concern. The copyright ownership of its historical translations requires separate verification, but it retains residual value on the corpus dimension
Evidence chain: No MAIK / Interperiodica member record on Crossref (source: Crossref REST API /members, filtered by location containing Russia, retrieved 2026-09); OpenAlex retains historical stock records for 14 journals (source: OpenAlex REST API (country_code:ru, type:journal), retrieved 2026-09)
Seven-dimension score: strategic leverage 2.4 · discipline-gap fit 3.0 · transferability 1.6 · AI-corpus value 2.6 · valuation and financials 4.2 · sanctions-compliance feasibility 3.4 · integration and operations 2.6 → overall 2.738 (rank 33)
5Valuation, Deal Structures and Risk Register
1. Why Now: 2022 Was a "Deal Break," 2027 Will Be a "Record Break"
Russian targets have become negotiable today not because they suddenly got worse, but because their connection to the global academic record system is being physically severed. Understanding this timeline is the precondition for judging the timing of a transaction.
Two widely circulated claims must also be corrected: first, the coordinated move by Western publishers in March 2022 was "stop selling and stop marketing, but do not stop publishing and do not stop reviewing" — Elsevier, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, Oxford University Press, IOP and others successively halted sales to Russia, but all cited COPE guidelines, expressly stating that they would not reject papers on the basis of author nationality. Second, neither Clarivate nor Scopus "deleted" Russian journals in bulk: as of July 2026, Web of Science still indexed about 400 Russian journals (of which only Russian Chemical Reviews sits in Q1) and Scopus about 850, with 30 even added in 2025. What was actually removed was RSCI, taken off the Web of Science platform in May 2022.
The real break point is 1 January 2027. On 2025-12-25, Pleiades notified 108 RAS journals of the termination of title and layout licences, effective 2027-01-01; on 2026-03-01, Springer's tripartite negotiations for the 2027 subscription season failed. And the English journal-title trademarks are registered in Pleiades' name — which means that even if the Russian Academy of Sciences translates and publishes on its own, it cannot return to international indexes under the original titles. The English translated-journal brands, volume/issue continuity and citation chains accumulated since the 1990s will be physically interrupted.