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Scientific journals represent the most important tool of communication between scientists. The key factor for the evaluation of scientists is their scientific productivity. In order for their scientific work to be positively evaluated, it is necessary for scientists to publish a considerable number of papers in journals indexed in relevant commercial databases (of which the most important are the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus). What also matters is that the published articles are highly cited. This preoccupation with numbers has changed the publishing culture and today, scientists are more preoccupied with how much and where they publish than with what they publish. The result is a significant increase in the number of journals and published papers, but this increase does not necessarily lead to the growth of science itself. Publishing pressure is often cited as a reason for scientific misconduct. This paper explores some of the biggest challenges in academia today: transparency and impartiality of the peer review process, publication of papers in predatory journals, growth of co-authorship, prolific authors, ghost writers and honorary writers. The paper will explore these challenges in the context of the Croatian Scientific Activity and Higher Education Act and the Ordinance on Academic Promotion and Advancement Requirements and Proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative overview of academic systems of Serbia and Hungary, with a special emphasis on scientific journals in the fields of arts and humanities in both countries. In the opening paragraphs, the author of the article discusses some negative consequences that the rigid implementation of the so called “Bologna reform process” has had on Serbian higher education, with the special emphasis on the fields of arts and humanities, and even more specifically, on the fields of (foreign) language and literature studies. One of the most obvious negative consequences of this reform process is the uncritical mimicking of the logic of natural sciences in arts and humanities, especially concerning the quantification and valorization of researchers’ results. This leads to a hyperproduction of papers in a field which’s mere logic is opposed to hyperproduction. In the central paragraphs of the article, the author discusses the status of scientific journals in the aforementioned fields in Serbia and Hungary. Despite all the efforts to preserve philological disciplines from the “fetish of internationalization” (as Konrad Paul Liessmann puts it), it seems that the “impact factor” model, imported directly and uncritically from natural and technical sciences, has dangerously infiltrated into the arts and humanities journals, as well. This, in the particular case of the so called “small” philologies (in this case, in Serbia and Hungary) puts researchers into an unfair starting position when trying to reach their academic advancement goals. While in Hungary there is currently only one journal that holds the prestigious Q1 ranking, Serbia has had no such journals to offer so far. In spite of this, Serbia has its own national journal and scientific paper quantification system, in which shorter individual papers are valued more than complete scientific monographs (in the form of sometimes rather extensive books), while in Hungary, the situation seems to be quite the opposite. However, the common consequence of the higher education system reform in both of these neighbouring countries – and this is the problem the final chapters of this article tries to deal with – is putting researchers under strong pressure to obey to the publish or perish! rule, which does not guarantee neither the quality of such papers nor the progress of the scientific field itself. One possible solution for resolving or at least mitigating this major problem could be to insist on qualitative, rather than quantitative paper-writing and publishing criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]