Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Frances Pinter. Frances is the founder of SUPRR (Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery).

The global scholarly publishing ecosystem is experiencing a period of severe turbulence. The crisis of the university monograph is no longer a theoretical threat — it is a financial reality. Against the backdrop of a sharp decline in print academic book sales (which have plummeted by 40-50% for humanities and social sciences over the last decade in the West), a highly precarious financial runway for Open Access (OA) models, and radical pressure from Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, academic publishing is looking for new structural anchors.

Can a country currently functioning at the epicenter of a major geopolitical shift offer solutions for the global market? On May 29, 2026, within the framework of the International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, a major Lab-Hub discussion titled “From Shelves and Drawers to Millions of Readers” took place. Organized by the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU) project ecosystem and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (TSNUK) with the support of the international initiative SUPRR (Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery), this event quickly outgrew the framework of a regional report. It transformed into a sharp debate on the economics of knowledge, rights management, and new sustainable business architectures. Below are the key highlights of my conversation with the leaders of the Ukrainian academic and publishing communities.

The Economics of OA Monographs: BPC, Diamond, or Grant Dependency?

Frances Pinter: Colleagues, let’s begin with the most painful issue: funding. The global Open Access movement for monographs has reached an infrastructural bottleneck. The classical Book Processing Charge (BPC) model — where an author or their institution pays between $8,000 and $15,000 upfront — is fundamentally unviable for Eastern European institutions. On the other hand, non-BPC frameworks like Diamond OA or library-funded consortia (Opening the Future, COPIM, Subscribe-to-Open) require a stable, predictable funding base. Victor, as a major commercial publisher, you argue that you are ready to publish university monographs and high-quality popular science (SciComm) under an OA model, provided that the initial setup costs are covered by NRFU grants or international foundations. But isn’t that simply replacing market demand with total grant dependency? What happens when the grants run out?

Victor Kruglov (CEO of Ranok Publishing House): Frances, let’s look at the harsh realities of the market: organic retail demand for highly specialized scholarly monographs in its pure form does not exist anywhere in the world anymore. According to official data from the Book Chamber of Ukraine, the average print run of a scientific monograph published between 2022 and 2025 hovered between a mere 100-300 physical copies. Relying strictly on post-publication marketplace sales is commercial suicide for any

publisher. A targeted project grant is not “dependency” — it is a venture investment in institutional intellectual capital. Our business model dictates that an upfront project grant (approximately $3,000 to $5,000 per book from sources like the NRFU) entirely covers the high-level pre-press infrastructure: rigorous blind peer review, professional copyediting, metadata indexing, and DOI assignment. We keep physical printing to an absolute minimum via Print-on-Demand (PoD), while the digital version becomes Diamond OA. The state or the funder isn’t purchasing paper; they are purchasing verified content quality and global discoverability.

Pinter: But Diamond OA still does not solve the long-term problem of platform sustainability. Someone still has to pay to maintain the hosting and distribution infrastructure over time. Ganna, which open-access monograph models could realistically work in Ukraine over the long-term?

Ganna Kharlamova (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (TSNUK)): We are leaning heavily toward a hybrid institutional framework that aligns closely with Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) and institutional library-funded consortia. Isolated BPCs are a total utopia for our current economic reality. Our strategic goal is to unite the country’s leading higher education institutions — such as the 10+ universities represented at our Lab-Hub discussion — into a centralized open-access publishing network. Instead of every individual university financing its own closed, highly inefficient internal publishing house or niche journal (“Visnyk”), those dispersed internal budgets must be consolidated to underwrite a single, unified national platform for Open Science. Western university presses survive on institutional backing and massive scale. We want to offer international library consortia a model of co-investment: Western research libraries gain seamless access to critical empirical data, and we secure the structural stability of our publishing platforms.

Artificial Intelligence and Discoverability: “Invisible to AI means non-existent”

Pinter: In 2026, Artificial Intelligence has become the primary consumer, parser, and filter of scholarly research. Large Language Models (LLMs) and specialized AI research assistants are entirely rewriting how scholars discover and synthesize literature (discoverability). If a monograph is not ingested into the core databases from which AI systems learn, it effectively ceases to exist for international science. How does Ukrainian academic publishing plan to survive in an era of AI-mediated knowledge systems?

Valentin Sobchuk (TSNUK): This is our most critical strategic argument. Currently, thousands of high-caliber Ukrainian studies are structurally locked away. They exist as low-resolution, non-searchable flat PDFs buried deep within internal university institutional repositories or outdated departmental websites. These books are hidden away in “digital drawers.” They are invisible not only to human international researchers but, far more critically, they are entirely invisible to AI scrapers and semantic search indexing web crawlers. AI cannot index, analyze, or recommend content that lacks clean semantic metadata, machine-readable structures, and explicit Creative Commons licensing. Our proposed structural reform is essentially a rescue operation for academic data. We are re-engineering text pipelines so that Ukrainian research is fully machine-readable. If we feed AI systems high-quality, open-access, structurally structured content, a distinct Ukrainian scientific voice will finally populate the generative responses of ChatGPT, Claude, and specialized tools like Consensus or Elicit.

Research Assessment vs. SciComm: Scholarly Excellence or Media Hype?

Pinter: Let’s look closely at internal university governance. Olga Polyukhovych has proposed a radical shift: formally counting public lectures, media expert appearances, and the authorship of high-quality popular science books into the annual individual evaluation reports and internal ranking metrics of university professors, alongside providing dedicated sabbatical leaves specifically for writing SciComm literature. Let me play devil’s advocate here. Won’t this inevitably incentivize cheap popularity and social media “likes” over rigorous, fundamental scholarly excellence? Where is the line between valid science communication and academic populism?

Olga Polyukhovych (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy): Frances, that is a highly legitimate concern, but we are definitely not advocating for replacing a scholar’s h-index with their Facebook follower count. We are talking about expanding the restrictive boundaries of Research Assessment, a move that aligns directly with the pan-European frameworks established by CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment). A popular science monograph can possess an incredibly rigorous level of internal peer-review. The tragedy of our legacy system is that it financially rewards scientists for producing highly dense, dry texts that will literally be read by only three people: the author, the reviewer, and the ministry auditor. This is an immense waste of intellectual energy. We are proposing to measure and reward social impact. If a monograph provokes an active public debate, or if its data is actively utilized by policy analysts, investigative journalists, or international humanitarians, that constitutes genuine, measurable research impact. The university is obligated to support such output with dedicated sabbaticals.

Ganna Tolstanova (Vice-Rector for Research, KNU): To add to this from a university management perspective: quality control via blind peer-review remains an absolute, non-negotiable border. Even if a manuscript is explicitly structured for a broad public audience, it must pass through our expert internal peer-review committees. The university underwrites every single thesis with its institutional brand name. We are reforming the outward-facing form; we are not lowering the bar for scientific substance.

The Rights Management Bottleneck: What Ukrainian Academia Lacks Most

Pinter: Any practical conversation regarding international co-publishing inevitably crashes into the complex legalities of intellectual property and Rights Management. Western university presses operate essentially as highly sophisticated commercial corporations dealing in intellectual property rights: they know exactly how to trade translation rights, how to license Open Access variants globally, and how to protect digital assets. What is the status of this within Ukrainian universities? What specific legal competencies are most critically lacking?

Yana Sychikova (Berdyansk State University): Institutional rights management is our absolute weakest operational link. The vast majority of Ukrainian universities are legally unequipped to properly structure the transfer of intellectual property rights from the individual faculty author to the institution, particularly when dealing with complex international Creative Commons frameworks. We routinely face scenarios where a top-tier professor signs a contract with a foreign publisher and unwittingly forfeits 100% of their subsidiary rights, stripping their home university of the legal right to even upload the paper or book into an open repository. We are facing a severe deficit in professional legal and managerial expertise regarding Subsidiary Rights and modern digital distribution. This is exactly why we are not asking for financial handouts from British or American university presses; we are looking for a rigorous transfer of knowledge. We need structural, joint publishing programs where our internal rights managers learn international standards directly while co-producing titles.

The User Perspective: Who Actually Reads the Monograph?

Pinter: We hear a great deal about authors, publishers, and ministries of education. But we rarely discuss the end-user. Who is reading university monographs out of Ukraine right now, and do you have concrete case studies where an academic output successfully broke through to the public?

Tetiana Yaroshenko (State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine (STTL U)): The end-user profile has evolved dramatically. Historically, the consumer of a monograph was almost exclusively the colleague sitting at the desk next to the author. Today, our primary audience comprises international policy analysts, diplomats, foreign correspondents for global media outlets, and domestic architects of public policy.

Consider a concrete case study: a collaborative, cross-institutional open-access monograph produced by our sociologists and economists investigating the structural transformation of local municipalities absorbing hundreds of relocated businesses. Because the book was released as an immediate Open Access title, it bypassed standard distribution limits and was downloaded over 5,000 times within the first 90 days. More importantly, the explicit policy briefs extracted from that monograph landed directly on the desks of government ministers and international donor agencies drafting regional reconstruction budgets. The book became an active, living instrument for political decision-making. That is the user perspective in action.

Polina Kostriulina and Viacheslav Kudlai (Mariupol State University): For our university, which is operating entirely in exile after the total destruction of our physical infrastructure, an open-access monograph has an existential user perspective. Our audience is the global community, to whom we must continuously prove that our cultural identity and our scientific capacity are alive. When an international researcher downloads our work from a global open repository, it is a direct act of recognizing our academic sovereignty.

Conclusion: Beyond Charity to Symmetrical Intellectual Partnership

Pinter: Ganna, as we wrap up this intense and highly informative debate, your organizing committee is preparing a formal policy memorandum for the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU). What is the definitive message you are sending to the wider global publishing community ?

Ganna Kharlamova: Our definitive message to the global scholarly community, publishers, and the editors reading The Scholarly Kitchen, can be condensed into a single, uncompromising thesis: We are not asking for charity; we are offering an equal, high-value intellectual partnership. Ukraine currently possesses a wealth of raw, unique empirical data that the global scientific community desperately needs to understand systemic crises — ranging from macro-economic resilience and supply-chain survival to cognitive security and cyber defense. We bring this high-value intellectual content to the table. In return, we require international publishing infrastructure, deep rights management training, and access to global distribution pipelines. This is a classic, win-win strategy. The crisis of the monograph cannot be solved in isolation. Let us tackle it together by fully integrating our resilient empirical research into the global space of Open Science.

Author’s notes: 1) The Lab-Hub forum was organized under the auspices of the NRFU research project (Grant Agreement No. 132.03/0192). Document photography executed by Alina Volyk (TSNUK). 2) Google Translate was used for purposes of clarification between English and Ukrainian and back again as we worked together on editing the text.