Unpublished Scientific Documents as Object of Library and Information Services in the Digital Environment

The author considers the problem of including unpublished digital scientific documents published on the websites of scientific institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in the system of library and information services. The paper describes the study of this class of information objects conducted in May — June 2020 on 200 websites of academic institutions of social and humanitarian profile. The author discovered the unpublished scientific materials of socio-humanitarian profile on the websites of 158 institutions; five institutions had no websites or did not work; and 37 websites didn’t have the materials the author was looking for. The research is based on the data included in the Navigator of information resources on social Sciences (NIRON), developed at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INION RAS). The author proposes classification of unpublished documents, which includes both well-known types of scientific documents, such as dissertations and reports on research work, which processing is regulated, and new types, specific for modern scientific communication, such as overviews on activities of institutions and scientific departments. In total, the described class of unpublished scientific documents consists of 10 types, some of them are divided into subtypes. The paper discloses the quantitative data of the conducted accounting, including distribution of documents by the retrospective depth. For scientific reports, the author made the comparison with the data on reports in the Unified state information system for recording the results of research, development and technological works for civil purposes. The article analyses the specific features of presenting different types of unpublished scientific materials on the websites. The author proposes to include these documents in the service system using the information-reference system. When designing such a system, many controversial issues arise, in particular: the problems of metadata, the choice of subject classification, determination of the exact composition of unpublished digital scientific documents, unification of the retrospective depth, the feasibility of their reworking and editing for unification, inclusion of unpublished documents in bibliographic databases and lists, and the possibility of using them in the anti-plagiarism system. These and other problems require further research and solutions.