Svitlana Fiialka

This paper highlights the authorship, co-authorship, and peer review experience of Ukrainian early career scientists to see their attitudes to scholarly communication. A questionnaire was distributed through Facebook groups and university networks all over Ukraine. Results from 630 respondents demonstrated contradictory tendencies of Ukrainian early scientists’ publication activity. Most respondents try to gain recognition, adhere to high standards, and improve their writing skills. Meanwhile, there is a problem of low motivation, violations of academic integrity, detachment from the international scientific community, etc. 5.6% of respondents admitted that they wrote articles where they substituted the results without conducting experiments, deliberately distorted the results of research, and forged experimental data. Above a half of the respondents (52.9%) have experience of reviewing and consider it to improve their authorship skills, engage in scientific dialogue, cope with new methods and theories, etc. But 95.0% of reviewers had problems, for example obviously poor-quality articles for review (47.5%), a request for a review when the article does not match the reviewer’s qualifications (32.5%), no access to data to check dubious results (15.0%), lack of instructions for reviewers (10.0%), ignoring significant remarks by authors (7.5%). The survey showed a significant predominance of co-authored articles. Among the main motives for publishing co-authored articles, respondents highlighted the following: saving time, intellectual development, co-payment of publications, access to expensive equipment, the chance of being quoted, and cooperation.

The purpose of the paper is to summarize the organizational and ethical aspects, problems and prospects of peer reviewing. To do this, from September 2019 to January 2020, a survey of Ukrainian scientists registered in Facebook groups “Ukrainian Scientific Journals”, “Ukrainian Scientists Worldwide”, “Pseudoscience News in Ukraine”, “Higher Education and Science of Ukraine: Decay or Blossom?” and others was conducted. In total, 390 researchers from different disciplines participated in the survey. The results of the survey are following: 8.7% of respondents prefer open peer review, 43.1% – single-blind, 37.7% – double blind, 9.2% – triple blind, 1.3% used to sign a review prepared by the author. 75.6% of respondents had conflicts of interest during peer reviewing. 8.2 % of reviewers never reject articles regardless of their quality. Because usually only editors and authors see reviews, it can lead to the following issues: reviewers can be rude or biased; authors may not adequately respond to grounded criticism; editors may disregard the position of the author or reviewer, and journals may charge for publishing articles without proper peer review.

This paper highlights war effects on publication activities and scientific interests of Ukrainian researchers. Moreover, it presents the moods and motives of Ukrainian scientists regarding their scientific activity and the publication of their results in academic journals. The research method was a survey (Google Forms) distributed through Facebook professional groups “Ukrainian Scientists Worldwide,” “Ukrainian cuisine of scientific publications,” “Scientific Conferences and Publications,” and “Higher School and Science of Ukraine: Disintegration or Blossoming?” 690 Ukrainian scientists took part in the survey. Only 35.7% of the respondents stated that the war did not affect their research process. Results from respondents demonstrated that 27.7% of the respondents changed their scientific interests because of full-scale Russian aggression. Furthermore, scientists have psychological problems due to the loss of home, relatives, and relocation. The survey showed that motivation for publishing scientific articles varies from informing colleagues of their scientific results, scientific interest to motives distant from scientific values – “fulfillment of the requirements of the institution where I work,” “I do not want to be fired,” etc. 20.0% of the respondents noted that they had not got any motivation for scientific activity and publishing. At the same time, most scientists consider state security, debunking the propaganda of the Russian Federation, economic development, military medicine, ecology, education, social sphere, and agriculture to be the leading research areas. They also see the need to raise public awareness of the role of science and synchronize current multidisciplinary scientific research.