Open Access Publishing – A Challenge for Russian Psychology

Publication practices in Russian psychology have changed a lot since the break-up of the Soviet Union, but still differ substantially from those in the Western countries. In the last decade, an exponential growth of the number of scientific psychological journals was observed, but in general, scientific publishing is not a profitable business in Russia. There is a lot of variability in the accessibility and quality of the journals. In sum, psychological publishing in today’s Russia is not well developed. Open access (OA) publishing technologies seem to bring clear benefits to Russian psychology, but there are some problems that prevent their ready acceptance. First, there is a linguistic problem – Russian readers and writers have bad command of foreign languages. Second, there is a problem of background –Russian readers and writers are not used to Western-style research papers. Third, there is an economic problem – it is unclear, whether Russian universities and funding agencies will ever be ready to support publications in OA-journals. Thus, self-archiving and no-fee OA seem to be the most obvious ways tointroduce OA to Russian psychologists. Key words: psychology; scientific communication; information dissemination; journals; openaccess; online publishing; language; funding; trends; Russia