ANALYSIS AND NEWS


RUSSIA’S ‘UNTAPPED POTENTIAL’ CARRIES RISKS


The banks of the Volga in February are cold. Off-season travelling in central Russia requires major determination, writes Martyn Lawrence


I


was in Russia on behalf of Emerald Group Publishing, travelling with colleagues to visit libraries in St Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan. If St Petersburg looks west and Moscow is the fabled heartland, Kazan is ancient eastern border country. Capital of the Republic of Tartarstan, the city lies 800km east of Moscow, an anxious 12 hours drive along the frozen M7 motorway (although a relatively painless flight with Aeroflot). Our intention was to learn more about the Russian higher education market for social science publishers. Russia has long been famed for its chemical, engineering and physical science output, and spending on R&D in these areas dwarfs all others. However, Emerald primarily publishes in the social sciences, and we wanted to know the potential for growth in an emerging economy. Plus we wanted to meet people; in Russia, the kommandirovka (business trip) still reigns supreme, and there is no substitute for what the Chinese call guanxi, and the Russians – slightly less elegantly, it must be said – call blat.


The situation


Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, universities in the newly-independent Russian Federation went through a difficult period of adjustment as an entire system of tertiary education adjusted to radical change. Russia finally co-signed the Bologna Declaration in 2003 – not without objections from several well-established universities – which began a gradual migration to a modernised higher education system.


In 2007, President Putin signed into law a declaration that introduced a two-tier education system: a bachelor degree followed by a masters, rather than the traditional single- degree course that lasted five years and was created in the 1940s at the height of the Soviet planned economy.


This transition was slow to take effect, and in the annual Times Higher Education (THE)


4 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015


university rankings, Russian universities were consistently poorly ranked. This weakness was attributed to poor global citations, since the Russian scholarly publication process – perhaps reflecting its social context – has historically rewarded productivity, not intellectual stimulus or theory development.


The year 2012 saw the nadir of this process, when only one Russian university was ranked inside the THE top 400. The ensuing frustration and national embarrassment led President Putin to accelerate a dramatic and systematic overhaul of the higher education sector with the aim of identifying and weeding out weak universities. An external audit of 600 public higher education institutions was commissioned, and 102 universities and 374 local branches were found wanting, on the basis of student quality, research intensity and productivity, and teaching space. Consequently, the Russian government has threatened widespread closures of poor- performing HEIs while offering significantly


‘National university rankings are also being developed in line with government targets’


increased funding for 15 leading universities. These top institutions will initially receive special grants totalling R9bn (£165m) in order to encourage English-language research. This is seen as the best way of improving citations, and thus the international rankings (and thereby the perceived status) of Russian universities. National university rankings are also being developed in line with government targets. President Putin’s ultimate aim is to have at least five of the country’s universities in the THE top 100 by 2020. Despite drawing criticism that Russia’s vast regions are being disadvantaged


Cold winds... The Volga river in winter


to the benefit of hyper-dominant Moscow, and that research is being left only in the hands of the privileged, the government is determined to press ahead.


Why this matters


These reforms are the most significant overhaul of Russia’s university system in living memory. So what of the impact on Emerald and other social science publishers? We feel they are


four-fold: l Increasing international research collaboration, improving quality of output;


l Elite universities will have more money to spend on subscriptions to international publications;


l Russian authorship in international journals will increase; and


l Government activity increases likelihood of national consortia deals.


This was what brought us to Russia. We visited nine universities in three cities, dividing our time between running publishing workshops for faculty, and interviewing librarians and library directors.


In our interviews, we asked about four issues: challenges and opportunities for overseas scholarly publishers; levels of faculty/student demand for English publications; specific requirements or rewards for faculty to publish; and trust of intellectual property/copyright assignment/peer review.


Challenges and opportunities for


overseas scholarly publishers l Government is overwhelmingly the driving force. Decades of central control and


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