Open Access Models of Russian Academic Journals

Open access (OA) to publications has been a global trend in publishing academic journals for a long time. The number of OA journals, including Russian ones, is growing steadily. The purpose of this study was to determine the main trends in the implementation of open access publishing models in Russian research journals. The article presents the results of a study of 396 journals included in the Russian Science Citation Index database: title of a journal; website address; international classification code (OECD group); quartile; Science Index indicator; open access model; license type; section of a journal’s website that contains information about the absence or presence and amount of an article processing charge (APC). It is concluded that the majority of journals implement Bronze OA which, firstly, does not comply with the key principles of open access, because it does not use open licenses, and, secondly, does not provide any guarantees that open access will continue to be open. The lack of accessible and transparent information about the conditions for further use of publications can create serious legal issues for the licensee. In turn, it will most likely be a problem for authors to calculate the amount of publication fee.