Digitalising Scholarly Publishing in Uzbekistan: An Integrated Ecosystem for Publication, Integrity and Indexing

Abstract

Higher-education reform in Uzbekistan has increased the number of manuscripts that doctoral candidates and academic staff must publish, while the infrastructure that makes a manuscript findable, citable and checked for integrity remains thin. This paper reports a single-case study of Innovative Academy, an Uzbek multi-venue publisher that automated its workflow from submission to publication in Open Journal Systems, and of its integration with Sindex, Similex and Imlox. Evidence comes from a production query on 17 October 2026, 166,340 pipeline log rows and internal audits. The database held 8,426 article records, of which 8,312 were completed and 86.4% carried a DOI. The live pipeline has fifteen stages, with human approval retained before publication, and administrators made 24,664 manual corrections across 3,369 articles. Most failures were operational rather than technical: an exhausted prepaid credit at an external plagiarism service stalled the flow from 12 August 2026, and 13,104 locally prefixed DOIs had no Crossref registration on 4 October. Automation therefore shifted risk from manual labour to external dependencies, credit balances and unverified success logs. Monitoring, shadow rollout and verified-state publication proved effective remedies. The evidence is internal, and common ownership of all four components is a conflict of interest.