War pushes Ukraine’s academic journals towards open access

Academic journals across Ukraine are continuing to publish despite staff departures, power cuts and the daily uncertainties of war as editors turn to digital tools to keep research alive.

Ganna Kharlamova, the director of the Coordination Centre for the Publishing of Scientific Journals at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, oversees more than 100 journals across different disciplines. She told Times Higher Education that most journals had reduced their output from 12 issues a year to about two because of the conflict. 

“Before the war, many journals relied on volunteer labour,” she said. “During the conflict, people have been focused on their paid work and survival. In our centre, we started to talk about how this work wouldn’t be free of charge.”

As the war approaches its four-year anniversary, Kharlamova explained she was focused on adaptation. “In 2022, we thought about recovery. In 2024, we also thought about recovery. Now we understand that it won’t be recovery, it’ll be full renovation. There will be strong digitalisation. We have a shortage of electricity now so no one will go back to paper.”

Kharlamova was among 20 delegates who last week participated in a programme at Oxford Brookes University organised with Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery (SUPRR), which brought together vice-rectors, journal editors and officials from the Ministry of Education and Science.

The initiative’s mission is to strengthen the publishing sector in Ukraine, which has faced extraordinary disruption since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The country’s largest printing facility, Faktor Druk, was bombed in a Russian attack in 2024. There are also reports of intellectual property being stolen in occupied territories. The war has forced many researchers to publish abroad in English-language journals, leaving domestic publications struggling to maintain output.

Sessions at Oxford Brookes focused on research integrity, sustainable financial models for university presses, metadata and digital preservation, and the future of open access publishing. Participants also visited UCL Press, Oxford University Press and Ingram Content Group to examine international models.

The initiative was founded by Frances Pinter, formerly the CEO of the Manchester University Press. She explained how digital platforms and open access had become essential amid the disruption. About 95 per cent of Ukraine’s core journal output is now openly accessible online.

“This represents a huge change in business models for scholarly publishing. In the Anglo-Saxon world we’ve only achieved about 50 per cent of journal articles published under this model,” Pinter said. “In Ukraine, printing and distribution are difficult, electricity is unreliable, and promotion is hard unless work is openly available.”

SUPRR was established shortly after the invasion as a volunteer-led initiative to provide emergency support to Ukrainian publishers. While it does not provide direct funding, its aim is to support adaptation to European Union standards, connect Ukrainian publishers to other publishers in the UK and provide training material.

“That support in the early days was symbolic as well as practical,” Kharlamova said. “It showed editors that someone had noticed what was happening.”

Byron Russell, the co-organiser of the event, said one of the long-term plans was to set up twinning between university presses in the UK and Ukraine. “Ultimately, we want to form a university press association in Ukraine. That’s where we’re heading,” he added.

For Volodymyr Netak, director of Ukrainian Catholic University Press, who attended the event, the challenges of wartime publishing are immediate and physical. His press publishes between 25 and 40 titles a year, spanning history, philosophy, theology and fiction. In the early months of the invasion, production stopped entirely as staff fled and printing capacity collapsed.

“Kharkiv is the main printing hub, and everything just fell apart in the early days,” he said. Even now, electricity shortages determine when presses can operate.

Despite this, Netak said output has largely returned to pre-war levels, although long-term planning remains impossible. “You don’t know what the economic situation will look like next year,” he said.

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com