Research and Teaching Staff of the Ukrainian Free University and Their Publications in 1921—1925 in the Open Access Context

Abstract

A systematic analysis of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the teaching staff of the Ukrainian Free University (UFU) and their publication activity in the context of Open Access during the first five years of the university’s operation was carried out. For this purpose we used general works published by this university in 1927, 1931 and 2011, several articles by M. Lozinski published in the newspaper "Svoboda" in 1921, books by S. Narizhnyi (1942) and S.V. Vidnyanskyi (1994), other publications and internet sources. The task was to identify all the teachers who worked in 1921—1925, the availability of all language versions of their biographical articles in Wikipedia, the years of their life and work at the university, as well as publications on the Internet, including full-text articles in Open Access. Forty-five UFU professors were identified who published 235 works during the 5 years of the UFU’s existence, of which 45.5 % (107 publications) are now in the Open Access. The top three authors, according to their publication activity, are D. Doroshenko, V. Zalozetskyi, O. Lototskyi, but the top three authors with the highest number of publications placed in Open Access are different: S. Rudnytskyi, D. Antonovich, M. Lozinskyi. However, the leaders in the number of biographical Wikipedia articles in different languages are quite different professors: I. Gorbachevskyi and Stepan Smal-Stotskyi, for each of whom 10 biographical Wikipedia articles were written in different languages. It is shown that 107 Open Access publications were represented by 175 files found in the Ukrainian digital libraries "Diasporiana" (88), "Chtivo" (44) and the Czech digital library "Kramerius" (32), while the first two libraries borrowed without declaration 43 files of publications from the Czech digital library. In the context of Open Access, considerations for preserving and perpetuating the heritage of the Ukrainian scientific diaspora are given, and a minimum set of additional parameters for describing rare and old works for digital libraries is proposed.