Making Uzbek Science Visible: A National Scholarly Index as Infrastructure for Higher Education Reform

Abstract

Uzbekistan's higher-education reform rewards publication in nationally recognised journals, yet the country has no open, harvestable index linking those journals' articles, identifiers and full texts, so most of the national research record cannot be seen, verified or counted. This paper presents Sindex (sindex.uz), a national scholarly index built in 2026, and reports what its construction revealed about Uzbek research metadata. Sindex harvests journal records through OAI-PMH, removes duplicates and publishes an identifier or metric only after its state has been verified, not merely when a field is filled. On 17 October 2026 the production database held 160,387 works from 124 venues, of which 56.7% were in Uzbek, 25.6% in English and 16.5% in Russian. Only 32.1% of works carried a registered DOI and 65.4% had no licence information. In an audit of 51,751 published works, 22.5% carried locally assigned DOIs that did not resolve, and a working DOI almost entirely determined whether full text was available (99.4% against 4.9%). Four public indicators proved false because empty fields had been read as good values. The main risks were identifier deposit failures and empty-as-good defaults, not harvesting capacity. Verified-state publication and an explicit "unknown" value are low-cost remedies. Findings are descriptive.