Book Culture in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine: an Attempt of Qualimetry Assessment

Abstract

Introduction. Every year, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (hereinafter referred to as “the NAS of Ukraine”) and its institutions issue near thousand book titles, but as few as, at most, 10% of them are published by professional publishing houses dealing with scholarly research literature. Therefore, a significant part of the scholarly research and publishing products of the NAS of Ukraine is prepared and issued without meeting the publishing and printing rules and standards, therefore it has low quality and informativeness.
Problem Statement. Despite significant achievements in the field of book culture, currently, there is no comprehensive system of indicators that would make it possible to quantitatively evaluate publishing products in terms of the preparation and production. Such a system can help detect the most frequent errors.
Purpose. The purpose of this research is to propose system and methodology for evaluating the book publishing and printing indexes based on the qualimetry approach.
Material and Methods. The qualitative approach has been used for creating a system of related and weighted separate indexes; mathematical methods have been employed for the evaluation of the results obtained. Publications of the NAS of Ukraine issued in 2019—2021 have been used as materials.
Results. An “indicator tree” has been developed; based on it, a book dossier for expert evaluation has been proposed; and 160 publications have been analyzed. This approach to scholarly research publications has been used for the first time in Ukraine. It has been established that the level of these scholarly research publications is generally satisfactory, with the printing quality being much better than the editing one. It has been found that while preparing texts, illustrative materials and layouts, the researchers neglect publishing standards, but pay for professional publishing services.
Conclusions. The new methodology has allowed quantitatively characterizing the general state of production of scholarly research and publishing products of the NAS of Ukraine and proven the inadequate level of their preparation. Identifying typical errors in the book preparation can become the basis for developing practical recommendations for the publishing bodies of the NAS of Ukraine in order to improve their products without involving significant additional resources.