Unlocking the hidden realms: analysing the Ukrainian journal landscape with Ulrichsweb - Nazarovets - Learned Publishing - Wiley Online Library

Abstract:  Although Ukraine is one of the leading countries in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of its number of scholarly journals, most of these journals are not widely recognized by the scientific community. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of scholarly journal publishing in Ukraine, using data from the Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory. The study aims to provide insights into the quantity and characteristics of Ukrainian journals, with a specific focus on historical context, publisher diversity, language of publication, and subject distribution. The findings reveal that Ulrichsweb encompasses details on over 1,500 active Ukrainian journal titles, some tracing their origins back to the 19th century. Notably, 85% of these journals are disseminated by academic institutions, including universities and research organizations. This study exemplifies the utility of Ulrichsweb as a valuable tool for investigating national scholarly journals underrepresented in other databases.

From the body of the article: "Also, despite the fact that Ukraine has adopted several regulatory documents on open science and open access (OA) policies since its independence, most recently the National Plan regarding Open Science (Nazarovets, 2022), there are no significant requirements for publishing OA journals in the country. However, there is a requirement for LPPU category B journals to submit electronic copies of issues to the ‘Scientific Periodicals of Ukraine’ portal of the Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine, where they are made publicly available online, and to the National Repository of Academic Texts2 (MES of Ukraine, 2018). The DOAJ indexes a relatively small number of Ukrainian journals, so previous known studies based on this data indicate a few OA journals in Ukraine – 359 (Laakso & Multas, 2023). At the same time, as of September 2023, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources (ROAD3) contains information on a much larger number of Ukrainian OA journals – 980."