Transformation of the Index of Foreign Journals in the “White List”

The article discusses the reasons for the emergence of the “White List”, which is a set of recommended journals for assessing the publication activity of researchers. In November 2024, it was announced that the Unified List of Academic Publications would be created based on the “White List”. Due to the fact that this list will be transformed in the near future, our goal was to monitor changes in the index of foreign journals in the “White List”, since they constitute the majority in this list, taking into account two samples (December 2024 and February 2025). We have studied such indicators as country and publisher, journal’s open access status, indexing in databases, thematic focus, as well as the number of foreign journals that have published works by authors with Russian affiliations for the period 2022–2025. To obtain much of this data, a JSON file from the website of the Russian Center for Scientific Information, where the “White List” is located, was not enough. Therefore, in order to extract the missing information, the open resource OpenAlex was used to construct API requests to the database. The study has yielded the following data: the leading publishers are Springer, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis with an open access share of 21–31%, indicating a hybrid open-access model. The DOAJ indexes 6,866 journals featured in the “White List”. Half of the foreign journals in the latter one focus on such subject areas as medicine (22%), social sciences (21%) and engineering (10%). Only one-third of the studied journals have published works by Russian authors in 2022–2025, and this figure is decreasing year on year. We have compared the two samples and found out that no changes were detected in the “White List” of the journals. This is quite natural since the monitoring began immediately after the announcement of the development of the Unified List of Academic Publications. We have described the starting point regarding the index of journals in the “White List”, and in further observations it will be possible to track even minor changes on the path to transforming the “White List” into the Unified List of Academic Publications.