REPOSITIONING VIETNAMESE ACADEMIC JOURNALS IN A NON-ENGLISH RESEARCH SYSTEM: CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND OPEN SCIENCE PATHWAYS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18623/rvd.v23.n2.4068Keywords:
Vietnam, Academic Journals, Research Evaluation, Open Science, Responsible Metrics, Non-English PublishingAbstract
Vietnam has experienced rapid growth in internationally indexed publications over the last decade, driven by performance-based funding, promotion criteria, and institutional ranking pressures. Yet domestic academic journals—most of which publish primarily in Vietnamese—have not benefited proportionally from this growth. They struggle to attract high-quality submissions, suffer from weak digital infrastructure, and remain marginal in research evaluation. This paper develops a system-level analysis of Vietnamese academic journals as part of an ecological chain shaped by national evaluation regimes, researchers’ publishing strategies, journal-level capacity, and emerging open science practices. Drawing on policy documents, prior bibliometric studies on Vietnamese education and social sciences, and comparative evidence from China’s Double First-Class initiative and international debates on responsible metrics and open science, the paper: (i) maps the Vietnamese journal ecological chain; (ii) diagnoses structural bottlenecks that weaken domestic journals; and (iii) outlines an open science–oriented reform pathway compatible with Vietnam’s institutional context. The proposed framework integrates insights from policy studies, scientometrics, and journal governance, and is intended to guide both empirical research and practical reform scenarios for repositioning Vietnamese journals in a non-English research system.
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