Higher Education in Russia and Beyond: Publish or Perish

The new issue of Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a journal that is aimed at bringing current Russian, Central Asian and Eastern European educational trends to the attention of the international higher education research community, is now available.

The topic of this issue is the already famous principle ‘publish or perish’, which is spreading fast across university systems all over the world. There are different ways of translating it into Russian — some are more formal, others less formal — but all of them convey the same message: in order to prosper (and, actually, just to stay) at university nowadays, faculty have to publish in addition to teaching. Of course, the proliferation of this principle has an impact on academics, on their self-perception and their strategies.

However, there are further implications to it. Universities, which face the principle at macrolevel because publication count is becoming an important institutional efficiency assessment criterion, have to adjust their employment policy accordingly. Publication count and quality are becoming key factors in terms of academic recruitment and promotion. Universities understand that such requirements may not suffice in the context of a weak academic labor market, so they are trying to provide their staff with an opportunity to master the competences they are lacking in order to learn to publish successfully. The journals market is responding too. For example, new low-quality titles are launched to swiftly accommodate the growing demand for ‘publications in high-impact journals’ — in exchange for a relatively small fee. As a result, though the number of articles is multiplying, it is partially due to the growing segment of ‘publications’ that don’t match even the minimum quality criteria.

All of these aspects are discussed in the present issue.

Previous HERB issues. 

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