Article 1: The Diversification of Russian Scholarly Publishing, 1995-2005 byJohn Bushnell

Anyone involved in Slavic Studies will confirm that Russian scholarly publishing is on the rise, but Bushnell sought to measure the increase in his study.  There are no statistical series that count scholarly books, so Bushnell used a random sample from the Russian Press Service database for the years 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005 in order to track publishing trends over a decade.  In his study, he defines scholarly publishing as monographs, collections of scholarly articles, and scholarly source publications while excluding translations, reprints, textbooks, memoirs and statistics.  He then assigned the publishers into five different categories:

• Those related to the Academy of Sciences
• Universities
• Other state institutions
• Religious institutions
• Private, commercial presses

The data suggests that scholarly publication nearly doubled in Russia.  Although it lags behind the growth of publishing overall, this is still quite an achievement.  Publishing among The Academy and universities remains strong, but the rise is largely due to the increased use of commercial presses.  However, The Academy and the universities still lead in the publication of collections of scholarly articles, since no commercial press would be interested in publishing them due to the low demand.   

According to this study, private publishers are most attracted to works of history and literary studies, with history accounting for between 40 and 50 percent in each of the years studies.  Literary studies account for between 10 and 20 percent.  This follows trends in studies, both in Russian and abroad, as history is being reassessed and authors banned during the Soviet Union are being re-evaluated.  Philosophy and religion round out the numbers.  

I chose this article for several reasons.  First, I held a Graduate Assistantship last year for Wook-Jin Cheun, the Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies at IU.  Although my duties did not include the actual acquistion of library materials, it did start me thinking about the challenges of collecting foreign academic materials.  Second, although my interests have shifted towards digital libraries and less towards Slavic librarianship, I still think it is important to keep up with the current state of library and publishing trends within the area.

This article is relevant because if publishing trends in Russia are changing, that means that librarians within Slavic studies have had to change their approach to collecting.  One can no longer purchase straight from the academy any more, but must now seek out books from these commercial publishers.  Luckily, from my experience with working with Wook-Jin, it seems there are a few vendors who have made this process a bit easier in the last few years.  Lastly, this news is encouraging.  It means that publishing in Russia is on the rise on the whole, and that is very welcome news for American academic institutions as it will mean a greater variety to select from.