The cost of scientific publication: vice-rector on free opportunities

On June 24, 2026, another OpenDoors event “Ask the vice-rector about…” was held. The speaker was Yana Sychikova, vice-rector for scientific work of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University. They talked about free opportunities for publishing scientific works in journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.

The lecturer dispelled the most common myth: “In fact, indexing in Scopus or Web of Science itself is in no way related to payment for publication”.

The majority are hybrid journals – platforms from the largest world publishers, where authors have the opportunity to publish for free, and only open access to materials requires payment.

Yana Sychikova also emphasized the exceptional position of Ukrainian researchers: “Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, IOP and others actually allow Ukrainian authors to publish without payment where for the rest of the world the APC is several thousand dollars”. We are talking about a 100% cut for open access publications. Many leading publishers in the world have been providing such opportunities since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

They also talked about diamond open access journals – an absolutely free environment for both publication and review of scientific works.

According to the vice-rector, open access to articles is one of the ways to establish cooperation.

The presentation of the event can be found at the link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20824513

Based on materials from Yana Sychikova’s Facebook page