Reviewing (expertise) of study publications: legal status of the subject of expert evaluation

The purpose of the article is to consider the processes (procedures) of reviewing (expert evaluation) of study publications on social disciplines in a technical university. The topic is relevant due to the fact that teaching the above-mentioned academic disciplines in technical universities is of an introductory nature, but the significance of these disciplines is great in terms of civic development, cultural training, and ethical education. Therefore, educational publications should be simple enough for students to understand and at the same time provide a systematic basis for the branches of social science knowledge, taking into account the current state ideology. The study provides an overview of the regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation on regulating the processes of preparation and review of educational publications; provides examples of grounds for initiating the writing of textbooks; considers the legal status of a reviewer and an expert; presents the experience of preparing and reviewing textbooks using the example of an author’s textbook and a textbook written by a group of authors, with and without reviews; and studies the requirements for the qualifications of a reviewer. The key idea of the article is that writing reviews of educational publications is a type of work and presupposes sufficient qualifications, no less than those of the author of the educational publication (knowledge of the subject, vision of pedagogical features, developed written speech). If the reviewer is not qualified enough, the deep structural connections, correlation qualitative (not quantitative) dependencies, bifurcation points, discrepancies between the demonstrated practice and imperfect theory will be hidden from him in the reviewed subject, and therefore one should expect a simplified perception of the educational text from him. The content of social science disciplines is impossible and cannot be adjusted to didactic units like the multiplication table: in the absence of structural and terminological diversity reflecting the decompositional versatility of concepts and phenomena, it is impossible to ensure ideological dominance in our information world. In conclusion, the article provides examples of studies of the quality of educational publications.