Contests

07.11.2017 PROVISION OF ACCESS TO THE INTERNATIONAL RESOURCES OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION KEY FACTOR OF IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF KAZAKHSTANI SCIENCE

In the age of information, when volume, flow and access to operational information increases every day, the issue of selection of scientific information, objective, relevant and reliable becomes one of the fundamental for scientists. However, in the vast ocean of scientific information, according to the different estimates of analysts, only 14% of necessary materials for scientific research are in free access, but the bulk, 86% of scientific knowledge is closed and access to it is possible only through the paid subscription.
In order to improve the quality and integration of domestic science into the world scientific community, in 2011 Kazakhstan signed a subscription to the authoritative international databases of Clarivate Analitics (formerly intellectual property and science division of Thomson Reuters) and Springer Nature. The effectiveness of access to these resources, free for domestic scientists, in an interview with K. Akhatova, the head of the department for access to international resources of scientific and technical information of JSC “NCSSTE”.


– What are the indicators determining the relevance of access to the international resources?
– As one of the objective indicators of relevance of resource is the statistics of user activity. Each provider of electronic resources generates statistics that are available as web pages or tables, which are tracked automatically monthly and annually. Since the moment of acquiring the national subscription, the activity of accessing the databases has grown by an average of 4-5 times. The users are researchers, teachers, doctoral students and undergraduates.
– How does the national rating look like: what is the top five for statistics at the moment?
– The rating on the statistics of using the Web of Science resource in 2017 is headed by the National Center for State Scientific and Technical Evaluation. The second and third places is occupied by KazNU named after Al-Farabi and ENU named after L.N.Gumilyov. The next line is Nazarbayev University. The top five is closed by Kazakh Agrotechnical University named after S.Seyfullin. If you look at the rating of organizations using Springer Link database, the first place is Nazarbayev University (Astana). Then follows the National Center of Neurosurgery (Astana). The third place is at IKTU named after Kh. A. Yassaui (Turkestan). The fourth in the top is KazNU (Almaty). The fifth line of the top is Central Scientific Library of the Gylym Ordasy (Almaty).


– Considering that the main goal of free access to the bibliometric databases is the growth of articles of Kazakhstani authors in peer-reviewed publications, which journals have the largest number of publications today?
– Every fifth article is published in the journals of Springer Nature publishing house. According to the statistics, four of five magazines in which Kazakh researchers published, are published by Springer. Thus, Kazakhstani scientists publish more than 300 articles annually in high-ranking magazines of the publishing house, which is more than 15% of the total number of all articles published abroad from Kazakhstan.
– How do you solve the issue of increasing the user competencies?
– Each year, the Center (NCSSTE) in cooperation with partner companies conducts more than 200 training seminars and trainings on the use of electronic resources for scientific and educational activities. This year, we have already organized more than 170 training seminars with Springer Nature and Clarivate Analytics, as well as more than 80 online training seminars.
– We say that our scientists need to be published in foreign rating journals, how is the process of integrating Kazakh magazines into the international bases?
- About 6 domestic journals were included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), which is the part of Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) database, three of them, by the way, are editions of KarSU named after E.A.Buketov.


– Human capital is the main resource for building a knowledge-based economy, are there any tools to increase the motivation of scientists?
– Our Center in cooperation with Clarivate Analytics company are the founders of the annual independent science and technology award “Leader of Science”, which is awarded for high scientometric indicators according to the information resource Web of Science. Also, it was established an independent Springer Top Author award together with Springer Nature, the laureates of which are scientists from Kazakhstan and Central Asian countries who have high rates of publication activity in publisher’s journals.

Baglan Kulumbayeva,
Department of Public Relations of JSC “NCSSTE”

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