Russian scientific journals in the field of copyright protection, business interests, and editorial ethics

In the article the prominent historian and scientific journal publisher Sergey Ippolitov analyzes the current situation in Russia in the field of scientific journals publishing. The focus is made on the key issues of publishing state-owned and private journals, such as the copyright protection of the authors of published articles, business models in publishing, and editorial ethics. The complicated interrelations between these issues are revealed through the example of the journals in the field ofthe humanities, particularly, history and art studies. Dealing with financing the publishing business, the author highlights the difficulties of publishing the journals of open access. The article examines the present situation in scientometrics in Russia, the role of international bibliographic databases for the rating and image creation of Russian scientific journals. The author also discusses the question about Russian national sovereignty in the field of scientometrics. It is concluded that there is an acute demand for the elaboration of national instruments to assess the quality of Russian scientific journals, the development of electronic libraries and widespread introduction of an open access model to articles published in Russian scientific journals, both state-owned and private ones. All this, argues the author, should become one of the main elements of national science, education and culture policies.