The Architecture of Russian Academic Publishing

1Executive summary

Ten findings that define the Russian academic publishing landscape today.

1. A dual system. Russia runs two publishing circuits in parallel: a small international gateway — translation houses such as Pleiades Publishing, MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica and Springer's Russian programmes — and a very large domestic circuit of several thousand mostly low-volume journals published by universities and institutes.
2. Extreme fragmentation. Of 3,261 journals, 2,293 (70%) sit with a society, a single institute or an unaffiliated host. The long tail, not a handful of "Elsevier-style" giants, defines the market.
3. Concentration at the very top. One company, Pleiades Publishing, hosts 125 journals — more than double the Russian Academy of Sciences system (112 journals across its imprints) and far ahead of the largest university press.
4. Output has peaked — and is falling. Russian-affiliated authors published 231,943 papers in 2021; by 2024 the figure was 179,939, a decline of roughly 22%. The break coincides with the 2022 sanctions and the withdrawal of Clarivate and Elsevier from the Russian market.
5. Open access is the real growth story. The OA share of Russian-affiliated articles climbed from 20% in 2005 to 66.2% in 2024 — five times faster than the global average in the same period.
6. But "OA" here is mostly free-to-read, not fee-funded. Only 79 of 653 Russian DOAJ journals (12%) charge article processing charges; the rest are diamond/platinum OA, financed by institutions or the state.
7. DOAJ quality control is a bottleneck. Just 516 of 3,261 journals (15.8%) appear on the DOAJ whitelist, despite 1,299 journals being flagged as OA — a whitelisting gap that also reflects the sector's quality-control problem.
8. University presses lead the credentialed OA segment. RUDN University (24 journals), Saratov State University (15) and Moscow State University of Psychology and Education (13) top the DOAJ list — not the commercial houses.
9. Citation impact is hyper-skewed. Pleiades' portfolio alone carries 1.66 million citations. A dozen legacy physics, chemistry and mathematics titles absorb most of the international citations earned by Russian journals.
10. The DOI economy is now domestic. The largest DOI producers in Russia are the Academy of Sciences (64,749 DOIs), Nauka (57,551) and ECO-Vector (53,567) — commercial and academy publishers replacing the role once played by global platforms.

2How to see the system: five layers

Russian academic publishing is best understood as five stacked layers, each with a different function and a different international exposure.

• Layer 1 — The academy. The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and its publishing arm Nauka (founded 1923 as the USSR Academy of Sciences Publishing House) remain the symbolic core. In our data the RAS system accounts for 112 journals and some of the most-cited physics and mathematics titles.
• Layer 2 — The translation gateway. Because global databases historically indexed English versions, a set of intermediaries — Pleiades Publishing, MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica, Allerton Press, and Springer/Elsevier programmes — republished Russian journals in English. Pleiades alone carries 125 titles and 1.66 million citations.
• Layer 3 — University and institute presses. Nearly 500 journals are published by universities and research institutes. These are the workhorses of national visibility and the main source of new OA titles.
• Layer 4 — Commercial publishers. About 167 journals belong to commercial houses (ECO-Vector, Infra-M, BIBLIO-GLOBUS, Gramota, Geotar, Media Sphere and others). Many are the largest DOI issuers and the most professionalised operators.
• Layer 5 — Platforms and repositories. eLIBRARY.RU with its Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI, ~13 million publications, 5,000+ journals) and the open repository CyberLeninka (≈1.22 million works indexed in OpenAlex) are the de-facto national infrastructure — the distribution layer that substitutes for Scopus, Web of Science and institutional subscriptions.

Figure 11

Who publishes Russia's journals

3Who hosts the journals: a fragmented head

Ranking hosts by the number of journals they manage shows a market with a clear elite but no monopoly.

Figure 2

Top 20 Russian journal hosts by number of active journals

The top of the distribution is dominated by three different institutional logics:

• Translation aggregators (Pleiades, MAIK Nauka, Springer's Russian list) — built to carry Russian research into English-language indexes. Their scale is a legacy of the 1990s–2000s "cover-to-cover translation" model.
• The academy (RAS imprints) — broad but no longer hegemonic; 112 journals across the system, with citations concentrated in physics and mathematics.
• University presses (Saint Petersburg State University, Omsk State University, Ural Federal University, RUDN) — numerous, smaller, and much more likely to be open access.

Commercial names such as Infra-M (37 journals), Academic Publisher House Researcher (23) and BIBLIO-GLOBUS (21) are disproportionately important in law, economics and the social sciences, where domestic demand — not international indexing — drives volume.

Figure 8

Scale versus impact

4Output and the 2022 break

The volume story is simple: two decades of growth, a peak in 2021, then a structural decline.

Figure 1

Russian-affiliated research output and open-access share, 2005–2024

Three forces explain the shape of the curve:

• Pre-2022 growth was driven by rising domestic publication pressure — the "publish or perish" incentives attached to the VAK (Higher Attestation Commission) list and to university performance targets, which multiplied low-cost journals.
• The 2022 rupture. Clarivate suspended its Russian operations and stopped evaluating new journals; Elsevier halted sales and Scopus access for Russian institutions. Submission and indexing channels shrank at the same time as international co-authorship became harder.
• A domestic turn. Output shifted towards national journals and conferences. The OA share rose even as total output fell — consistent with a system where free-to-read, institutionally funded publishing is the default outlet.

Figure 7

Largest Russian journals by indexed output

5Open access: a state-scale diamond model

Russia's open-access system is broad, cheap for authors and structurally different from the Western APC economy.

Figure 4

The Russian open-access landscape

Figure 6

Business model of Russian OA journals in DOAJ

The combination is distinctive. In most of the world, "open access" and "article processing charge" are near-synonyms. In Russia the dominant model is diamond OA: no author fee, no reader fee, funded by the publishing institution. That keeps the barrier to publication low, but it also removes the revenue signal that elsewhere supports editorial quality, plagiarism checks and professional production.

Figure 12

Language strategy of Russian OA journals

6Whitelisting and the subject profile

DOAJ membership is the closest available quality signal — and only 15.8% of Russian journals have it.

Figure 5

Leading Russian publishers in DOAJ

Figure 9

Subject profile of Russia's DOAJ journals

Two interpretations are possible, and both are partly true. On the one hand, Russia's social sciences and humanities have embraced diamond OA enthusiastically, using it to build national visibility without paying international fees. On the other, the STEM titles that historically earned Russia its citation stock are largely absent from DOAJ because they are published commercially or through the translation gateway, under subscription models.

7Where the impact actually sits

Citations per indexed work reveal a small, ageing elite surrounded by a very flat remainder.

Figure 10

Highest-impact Russian journal hosts

The impact ranking is dominated by:

• Academy physics and mathematics — journals such as Physics-Uspekhi (Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk), the Steklov Institute's mathematical titles and the JETP family, which carry decades of accumulated citations.
• Translation gateways — the same content reaches international indexes through Pleiades and MAIK Nauka, inflating their citation totals relative to their title counts.
• Medical and life-science journals — a second tier with steady, if lower, per-paper impact.

Meanwhile the majority of the 3,261 journals — the economics, law, education and regional-studies titles that dominate the count — earn very few citations, often because they are not indexed anywhere that counts. The distribution is not merely unequal; it is bimodal, with a small internationally visible core and a very large domestically oriented remainder.

8The commercial layer and the DOI economy

Crossref registrations show who actually mints persistent identifiers for Russian research.

Figure 3

Russia's largest DOI producers on Crossref (all time)

Three observations follow from the DOI data:

• The academy still sets the standard. The Russian Academy of Sciences is the single largest DOI registrant in the country, with 64,749 DOIs — a reminder that in Russia the academy is also an infrastructure provider, not only a research body.
• Commercial publishers are the professional core. ECO-Vector, Infra-M, BIBLIO-GLOBUS, Media Sphere and Gramota invest in digital identifiers at a scale that most university presses do not. They are the closest thing Russia has to a modern, service-oriented publisher class.
• Platform dependence is a risk. Domestic DOI and citation infrastructure is concentrated in a few actors and in state-linked systems (eLIBRARY.RU / RSCI). Any disruption to those platforms has no fallback.

9Risks, tensions and outlook

Five tensions will shape the next five years.

10Method, definitions and data sources

Everything in this report is reproducible from open APIs. No proprietary or corrected market data was used.

Data sources

• OpenAlex (api.openalex.org) — 3,293 sources whose country is Russia, of which 3,261 are typed as journals and 15 as repositories; 2,364,775 indexed works and 3,859,879 citations accumulated across those journals. Yearly output and open-access series were computed from the Works endpoint filtered on authorships.institutions.country_code:RU.
• Crossref (api.crossref.org) — all 1,735 member records whose registered location is in Russia, with lifetime DOI counts.
• DOAJ (doaj.org) — 653 journals whose publisher country is RU, including APC flags, licences, languages and subject classification.

Definitions

• Host — the organisation OpenAlex records as the journal's host_organization; "Independent / no host organization" covers the long tail with no recorded publisher entity.
• OA share — share of works (or journals) flagged open access by OpenAlex; this mixes gold, hybrid, diamond and green routes and is an upper bound on fully-OA publishing.
• DOI count — lifetime DOIs registered by a Crossref member; a proxy for output and digital maturity, not for quality.
• Impact — citations per indexed work; sensitive to corpus age and field mix, and not field-normalised.

Limitations

• Publisher name forms differ between OpenAlex, Crossref and DOAJ, so publisher-level totals are per-source and are not fully reconciled into one entity graph.
• OpenAlex coverage of Russian-language and non-DOI journals is incomplete; the domestic long tail is under-counted.
• 2024 figures are affected by indexing lag and should be read as provisional.
• Country attribution follows author affiliation for works and publisher registration for journals; "Russian" publishing activity abroad may be missed.

Retrieved via public APIs from OpenAlex, Crossref and DOAJ. Chart set generated for this report; figures are available as standalone PNG files. RUDN University = Peoples' Friendship University of Russia.

AData appendix

Full ranked tables behind the charts. Click any column header to sort.

A.1 · Journal hosts (OpenAlex, top 30)

A.2 · Crossref members in Russia (top 40 by lifetime DOIs)

A.3 · Largest journals by indexed output (top 25)

A.4 · Leading publishers of DOAJ journals (top 25)