Twelve findings
Ukraine's publishing problem is not a lack of journals, openness or effort. It has too many journals, more openness than almost any peer, and a demand signal that rewards publication rather than readership. The system works exactly as designed — which is the problem the 2026 reform has set out to solve.
Ukraine runs one of Europe's largest journal systems — and it is almost entirely domestic
OpenAlex records 1,856 scholarly sources with a Ukrainian country code, of which 1,840 are journals. Together they carry 1,007,940 articles and 886,181 citations. Only Poland, among Ukraine's regional peers, has a comparable number of titles. The system is not a satellite of foreign publishing: it is a large domestic industry of its own.1
The state, not the market, decides what a journal is
The Ministry of Education and Science maintains the register of scientific professional publications in which dissertation results must appear. The August 2026 dashboard lists 1,302 Category-B journals from 502 founders and more than 19,000 editorial-board members; Category A — journals in Scopus or Web of Science — runs to about 204 titles. Publishing in a listed journal is a degree requirement, so the list, not readership, is the demand signal that sustains the whole sector.2,3
It is a diamond-open-access superpower
Ukraine has 546 journals certified by DOAJ — 2.32% of the global total and twelfth in the world, ahead of the Netherlands and far ahead of Japan. Of those, 336 (61.5%) charge no article-processing fee and 393 (72%) use a plain CC BY licence. In 2024, 90.7% of Ukrainian-authored journal articles were open access and 53.5% of all output was diamond. Few research systems of any size are this open.4,1
Ownership is anonymous
1,162 of Ukraine's 1,840 journals — 63% — have no publisher recorded in OpenAlex at all. Another 620 belong to a single institution. Only 58 sit with a publisher that runs more than one title. In most countries a journal's publisher is the unit that carries standards, licences and accountability; in Ukraine that unit frequently does not exist on paper.1
Volume is enormous; impact is thin
Ukrainian journals have accumulated 1,007,940 articles and 886,181 citations — 0.88 citations per article. The median journal has 152 citations; 733 journals (40%) have fewer than 100, and 27 have none at all. The largest single title by volume, a Ternopil pedagogical series, holds 90,263 articles and just 1,213 citations. Scale and influence have come apart.1
A handful of volume publishers dominate the DOI register
Ukraine has 682 Crossref members holding 1,060,992 DOIs — 2.01% of the world's members but only 0.61% of its DOIs. The distribution is extremely skewed: Publishing House Helvetica alone accounts for 139,409 DOIs (13.1% of the national total), the top ten members hold 32.9% and the top fifty 60%. The median member has 380 DOIs and 64 members have none.5
The international gateway is narrow
About 204 Ukrainian journals are indexed in Scopus or Web of Science — roughly 11% of the national stock. OpenAlex marks only 15 Ukrainian journals as 'core' sources. The remaining nine in ten are invisible to the indexes that drive hiring, funding and international reading, even when they are open access and carry DOIs.3,1
The language map was redrawn in a decade
In 2014, Ukrainian authors published 16,534 articles in English, 6,314 in Ukrainian and 1,640 in Russian. By 2024 the figures were 58,924 in English, 31,004 in Ukrainian and just 415 in Russian. Russian fell from 6.7% of output to 0.46%; English became the majority language of Ukrainian scholarship. This is one of the fastest linguistic reorientations in modern publishing.1
The war produced a dip, not a collapse
Articles by Ukrainian-affiliated authors rose to 80,926 in 2021, fell 7.4% to 74,938 in 2022 — the year of the full-scale invasion — then rose again to 91,497 in 2023, 93,539 in 2024 and 106,015 in 2025. Journals kept publishing through blackouts and displacement. The measured cost is human, not bibliometric: about a third of the research workforce left or stopped, and research time fell by 26%.1,6
International collaboration is rising but still below peers
Foreign co-authorship remains modest. The largest partners in 2024 were Poland (2,547 co-authored articles), Germany (1,599), the United States (1,529), the United Kingdom (1,028) and China (1,004). In 2023, 40.8% of NASU and 32.2% of university articles had an international co-author, against 60–70% in developed research systems.1,7
The reform now under way is the most consequential story
Order No. 56 of January 2026 rewrote the rules: 13 evaluation criteria, applications only through the URIS system, three-year re-competition for Category B, and a Publication Ethics Commission following COPE. The June 2026 list cut the register to 1,298 titles, rejected about 7% of applicants, made every listed journal open access and left 53% diamond. A Nature investigation into the Tanu.pro paper mill had alleged some 1,500 compromised articles.8,9,10,11
There are genuinely strong journals — they are just the exception
The most-cited Ukrainian journal is not the largest. Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies has 35,894 citations from 7,115 articles; SIGMA (mathematical physics, NASU) 18,853; Corporate Ownership and Control 19,469; Problems and Perspectives in Management 19,072. These titles are internationally indexed and professionally published. They demonstrate what the rest of the system could become — and how far most of it is from that standard.1
The shape of the system
Five layers, each with a different owner, funding source and incentive. The defining feature of the Ukrainian arrangement is that the layer which creates demand (the Ministry's list) is not the layer which owns the content (universities and the Academy), and the layer which registers the output (a handful of commercial houses) has no stake in whether anyone reads it.
Compiled from the sources cited throughout this profile. Journal counts are OpenAlex
sources with country_code=UA at September 2026.1
The five layers in detail
Each layer is described by what it owns, how it is funded, and where its structural weakness lies.
The Ministry
Ukrainian academic publishing is not primarily a market. It is a regulated list. The Ministry of Education and Science maintains the register of scientific professional publications (Перелік наукових фахових видань України) in which the main results of dissertations and academic-title applications must appear. Being on the list — not being read — is what creates demand for a Ukrainian journal.2,8,9,3
The Academy
The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) is the country's research establishment: roughly 4,200 articles by affiliated authors in 2024, the second-largest institutional output after Kyiv's national university. Its journals are the ones that travel — SIGMA, Condensed Matter Physics and the Ukrainian Journal of Physics are all indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.1,7,8
The universities
Ukraine's universities own more journals than any other kind of institution. Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv alone accounts for 53 titles, Oles Honchar Dnipro National University 36, and Kharkiv's national university 35. Most are visnyky — disciplinary bulletins, edited in-house by a department, published on an Open Journal Systems installation, and read mainly by their own doctoral candidates.1,12
The volume publishers
A small group of commercial publishing houses produces a disproportionate share of Ukraine's scholarly record. One firm, Publishing House Helvetica, has registered 139,409 DOIs — more than the National Academy and every university publisher combined. These houses serve the credential market: fast, inexpensive, Ukrainian-language journals designed for degree and promotion requirements.5,10,11
The infrastructure
Ukraine has built its own registration and repository layer — UkrINTEI as the Crossref sponsoring member and national DOI agency, the National Repository of Academic Texts, and the OUCI citation index — while leaving discovery largely to foreign platforms. The result is a system that can register a DOI for almost anything, but cannot make it visible.13,14,15,16,4,3
What the numbers show
All charts below were generated directly from the OpenAlex, Crossref and DOAJ APIs in September 2026 and are embedded in this document as vector graphics.
Growth without a system
counts_by_year.1Ukrainian authorship: a dip, then record highs
Ukraine is a top-twelve open-access nation
A language map redrawn in a decade
Where Ukrainian research is published
Who publishes it
Collaboration is real but modest
Who pays, who registers, who owns
Ukraine's publishing economy is unusually cheap. Most journals charge nothing to authors and nothing to readers; the money that does move is small. The scarce resource is not cash but legibility — and the DOI register shows how unevenly that is distributed.
One publisher, one eighth of the national record
Universally open
Anonymously owned
The impact inversion
The publishing houses, by the numbers
| Publisher | Kind | Crossref DOIs | Journals | Articles | DOAJ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publishing House Helvetica | Commercial · Kherson | 139,409 | 2 | 13,543 | 0 |
| Ukrainian Assembly of Doctors of Science in Public Administration | Professional association | 48,196 | not attributed | — | — |
| NAS of Ukraine (Ukrinformnauka) | Academy · Kyiv | 48,075 | 5 | 7,167 | 1 |
| European Scientific Platform | Commercial · Vinnytsia | 17,888 | not attributed | — | — |
| DKS Center | Commercial | 17,512 | 2 | 12,766 | 0 |
| Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv | University · Kyiv | 16,875 | 53 | 14,734 | 23 |
| Liha-Pres | Commercial · Lviv | 15,357 | not attributed | — | — |
| Private Company Technology Center | Commercial · Kharkiv | 13,500 | not attributed | — | — |
| Publishing House Zaslavsky | Commercial · Kyiv | 10,290 | 14 | 12,642 | 5 |
| Internauka | Commercial · Kyiv | 7,447 | not attributed | — | — |
| Virtus Interpress | Commercial · Sumy | 7,392 | 6 | 6,161 | 0 |
| Metascience | Commercial · Kyiv | 6,472 | not attributed | — | — |
| Business Perspectives (CPC) | Commercial · Sumy | 5,922 | 12 | 6,272 | 9 |
| Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk NPU | University · Ternopil | — | 4 | 91,174 | 3 |
| Black Sea Research Institute of Economics and Innovation | Research institute | — | 3 | 12,849 | 0 |
| Kharkiv State Academy of Physical Culture | University · Kharkiv | — | 10 | 14,688 | 4 |
The list, the war and the reform
Two forces have shaped Ukrainian publishing since 2018: a state register that decides which journals count, and a war that scattered the people who write them. The 2026 reform is the first serious attempt to make the register a quality instrument rather than a volume licence.
The register that creates the market
What the 2026 rules require
A decade of institutional change
The list is codified
MES order No. 32 of 15 January 2018 establishes the Порядок формування Переліку — the rules for the register of scientific professional publications.
A national DOI agency
UkrINTEI begins operating as a Crossref Sponsoring Member on 21 July 2019, issuing DOI prefixes to Ukrainian publishers.
99 A, 1,018 B
The Ministry's September 2020 position records 99 Category-A and 1,018 Category-B titles. Order No. 886 of 2 July 2020 had amended both lists.
War and open science
Russia's full-scale invasion begins in February. Output falls 7.4% in bibliometric terms; in October the Cabinet approves the National Open Science Plan (Resolution 892). Major publishers grant 100% APC waivers to Ukrainian authors.
183 journals indexed
The Open Science in Ukraine list records 183 Ukrainian journals in Scopus or Web of Science as of 31 July 2024 — the community's working measure of the international gateway.
The anti-predatory turn
A March draft order targets predatory journals; commentators note some 1,540 titles on the old list. A first competitive Category-A selection opens under Cabinet Resolution No. 1032.
The register is rebuilt
Order No. 56 of 19 January rewrites the Порядок. Order No. 928 of 11 June sets a 1,298-title Category-B list, all open access and 53% diamond, with about 7% of applications rejected. The MES dashboard launches in August.
The war in numbers
About 18.5% of Ukrainian scientists left the country after February 2022, and roughly a third either left or stopped practising science; research time fell from 13 to 10 hours a week. UNESCO estimated the cost of restoring public scientific infrastructure at more than US$1.26bn, with 1,443 buildings and laboratories damaged and 10–20% of researchers displaced. Five major publishers granted 100% APC waivers to Ukrainian authors, which is part of why gold open access from Ukraine rose even as the country was under attack.6,17,18
Six structural constraints
None of these are failures of effort. Each follows from the way the system is designed, and each is addressed — partially — by the 2026 reform.
The demand signal is wrong
A journal's customer is a doctoral candidate who needs a publication, not a reader who needs an article. That single fact explains the volume, the fragmentation and the low citation impact more economically than any quality argument.
Fragmentation is structural, not incidental
With 63% of journals lacking a recorded publisher and 682 Crossref members, Ukraine has more publishing entities than it has publishing institutions. Standards cannot be enforced on entities that do not exist.
Openness has outpaced discoverability
Ukraine does the hard part — free to read, free to publish, liberal licences — and then loses the benefit because only about 11% of its journals are in the indexes that scholars actually search.
Machine-readability is the next gap
Like many diamond-OA systems, Ukrainian journals often lack full-text XML and clean metadata. Open content that cannot be parsed is open in name only for text mining, translation and AI retrieval.
The paper-mill problem is real
The Tanu.pro investigation alleged about 1,500 compromised articles routed through a Kyiv-linked network. High-volume, low-barrier publishing created the conditions; the 2026 reform is the response.
The human base has been damaged
About a third of the research workforce left or stopped; institutions were destroyed or relocated. No publishing reform can substitute for the people the war dispersed.
Against its neighbours
Ukraine and Poland run journal systems of almost identical size. Poland produces a comparable number of articles and has twice as many DOAJ-certified titles — but Poland has been inside the European research area for two decades. Russia, with nearly twice the journals, produces twice the output and remains the largest system in the region.
| Country | Journals (OpenAlex) | Articles 2024 | DOAJ titles | Articles / journal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | 3,261 | 179,939 | 653 | 55 |
| Turkey | 2,130 | 143,319 | 716 | 67 |
| Poland | 2,083 | 89,132 | 1,011 | 43 |
| Ukraine | 1,840 | 93,539 | 546 | 51 |
| Romania | 705 | 29,921 | 357 | 42 |
| Hungary | 502 | 25,565 | 117 | 51 |
| Serbia | 429 | 16,524 | 205 | 39 |
| Czechia | 410 | 32,503 | 169 | 79 |
| Croatia | 331 | 13,399 | 168 | 40 |
| Bulgaria | 278 | 12,117 | 107 | 44 |
| Lithuania | 251 | 8,158 | 100 | 33 |
| Slovakia | 236 | 11,361 | 71 | 48 |
| Belarus | 80 | 5,265 | 19 | 66 |
| Moldova | 45 | 2,032 | 35 | 45 |
| Georgia | 44 | 5,099 | 12 | 116 |
Journals are OpenAlex sources of type journal with the given country code;
articles are works with an author affiliated to that country, 2024. DOAJ titles are from the DOAJ
journals API. Ukraine's article count exceeds the number published in Ukrainian journals
because Ukrainian authors also publish abroad.1,4
How much to trust each number
API-derived figures are exact as of the retrieval date but carry the coverage limitations of their sources. Institutional and reform figures come from published documents and carry the caveats noted.
References
Numbered in order of first citation. All links are external and were live in September 2026.
- 1OpenAlex REST API (sources, works, publishers endpoints).All journal, output, language, open-access, citation and institutional figures labelled 'measured' unless another source is given.
- 2Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, dashboard «Фахові видання України», launched 10 August 2026.1,302 Category-B journals from 502 founders and more than 19,000 editorial-board members. The founder count is given elsewhere as 562.
- 3Open Science in Ukraine project, «Всі українські наукові журнали у базах Scopus та WoS», updated 5 January 2026; earlier edition 31 July 2024.204 Ukrainian journals in Scopus and/or Web of Science as of January 2026 (183 as of July 2024). A community list, not an official register.
- 4DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals — journals API, retrieved September 2026.Certified open-access journal counts by country, licences, APCs, languages, preservation.
- 5Crossref REST API (members and works endpoints), retrieved 29 September 2026.Crossref membership counts, registered-DOI volumes and publisher concentration.
- 6G. de Rassenfosse, T. Murovana and W.-H. Uhlbach, “The effects of war on Ukrainian research”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11 December 2023.18.5% of scientists left Ukraine; about a third stopped practising science; research time fell 26%, from 13 to 10 hours a week.
- 7M. Hladchenko, “International collaboration of Ukrainian scholars”, Higher Education, 2026.In 2023, 40.8% of NASU and 32.2% of university articles were internationally co-authored, against 60–70% in developed countries.
- 8Ministry of Education and Science, order No. 928 of 11 June 2026 — new Category-B list; commentary by the NASU Scientific Publishing Council.1,298 titles in 15 clusters, valid 1 June 2026 – 31 May 2029; all open access, 53% diamond; about 7% of applications rejected; annual monitoring from 2026.
- 9Ministry of Education and Science, order No. 56 of 19 January 2026 — new edition of the Порядок формування Переліку; reported by Газета «Світ» (KPI), 30 January 2026.Thirteen evaluation criteria, applications only through URIS, three-year Category-B re-competition, cluster grouping and a Publication Ethics Commission following COPE.
- 10The Scholarly Kitchen, guest post “Integrity First: Inside Ukraine's Publishing Reforms”, 25 September 2026.The 2026 reform, the Tanu.pro paper mill, 684 of 1,302 Category-B journals operating diamond, and OUCI.
- 11A. Abalkina and S. Kleiner, investigation into the “Tanu.pro” paper mill, reported by Nature, 2026.About 1,500 articles allegedly compromised through a Kyiv-linked submission network.
- 12Ukrainian Research and Academic Network (URAN), publishing services; journals.uran.ua.URAN operates an Open Journal Systems hosting service used by many Ukrainian journals.
- 13Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technical Expertise and Information (UkrINTEI), DOI service — Crossref Sponsoring Member since 21 July 2019.UkrINTEI acts as the national DOI registration agency, assigning prefixes to Ukrainian publishers; publications need an English-language site meeting Crossref requirements.
- 14National Repository of Academic Texts (NRAT), run by UkrINTEI.National open repository integrating dissertations, research reports and institutional repositories.
- 15OUCI — Open Ukrainian Citation Index, built on Crossref Cited-by and I4OC; described in The Scholarly Kitchen, 25 September 2026.An open citation index covering close to 2,000 Ukrainian journals from about 400 publishers.
- 16Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Resolution No. 892 of 8 October 2022 — National Open Science Plan.Ukraine's national open-science plan, approved two months before the 2022 output trough.
- 17UNESCO, “Resilient Minds: the unseen struggles of scientists in wartime Ukraine”, 24 July 2025; UNESCO damage assessment, March 2024.More than 40 institutions relocated since 2014; 29.4% of research institutions damaged; 10–20% of researchers displaced; 54.3% unable to research at pre-war level; >US$1.26bn restoration cost.
- 18S. Nazarovets, “APC waivers and Ukraine's publishing output in Gold OA journals”, Journal of Data and Information Science, 2026.Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley granted 100% APC waivers after 2022; Ukrainian gold-OA output rose sharply.
This profile was assembled from public APIs and published sources in September 2026. All API-derived figures were measured directly and can be reproduced from the OpenAlex, Crossref and DOAJ endpoints. Institutional and policy figures carry numbered citations. Where a figure could not be verified independently, that is stated in the Confidence register.