Plagiarism may take place in any scientific journals despite currently employed anti-plagiarism tools. The absence of widely acceptable definitions of research misconduct and reliance solely on similarity checks do not allow journal editors to prevent most complex cases of recycling of scientific information and wasteful, or ‘predatory,’ publishing. This article analyses Scopus-based publication activity and evidence on poor writing, lack of related training, emerging anti-plagiarism strategies, and new forms of massive wasting of resources by publishing largely recycled items, which evade the ‘red flags’ of similarity checks.In some non-Anglophone countries ‘copy-and-paste’ writing still plagues pre- and postgraduate education. Poor research management, absence of courses on publication ethics, and limited access to quality sources confound plagiarism as a cross-cultural and multidisciplinary phenomenon. Over the past decade, the advent of anti-plagiarism software checks has helped uncover elementary forms of textual recycling across journals. But such a tool alone proves inefficient for preventing complex forms of plagiarism. Recent mass retractions of plagiarized articles by reputable open-access journals point to critical deficiencies of current anti-plagiarism software that do not recognize manipulative paraphrasing and editing. Manipulative editing also finds its way to predatory journals, ignoring the adherence to publication ethics and accommodating nonsense plagiarized items. The evolving preventive strategies are increasingly relying on intelligent (semantic) digital technologies, comprehensively evaluating texts, keywords, graphics, and reference lists. It is the right time to enforce adherence to global editorial guidance and implement a comprehensive anti-plagiarism strategy by helping all stakeholders of scholarly communication.

Numerous quantitative indicators are currently available for evaluating research productivity. No single metric is suitable for comprehensive evaluation of the author-level impact. The choice of particular metrics depends on the purpose and context of the evaluation. The aim of this article is to overview some of the widely employed author impact metrics and highlight perspectives of their optimal use. The h-index is one of the most popular metrics for research evaluation, which is easy to calculate and understandable for non-experts. It is automatically displayed on researcher and author profiles on citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Its main advantage relates to the combined approach to the quantification of publication and citation counts. This index is increasingly cited globally. Being an appropriate indicator of publication and citation activity of highly productive and successfully promoted authors, the h-index has been criticized primarily for disadvantaging early career researchers and authors with a few indexed publications. Numerous variants of the index have been proposed to overcome its limitations. Alternative metrics have also emerged to highlight ‘societal impact.’ However, each of these traditional and alternative metrics has its own drawbacks, necessitating careful analyses of the context of social attention and value of publication and citation sets. Perspectives of the optimal use of researcher and author metrics is dependent on evaluation purposes and compounded by information sourced from various global, national, and specialist bibliographic databases.

One of the main problems in the poultry industry is the search for a viable replacement for antibiotic growth promoters. This issue requires a “one health” approach because the uncontrolled use of antibiotics in poultry can lead to the development of antimicrobial resistance, which is a concern not only in animals, but for humans as well. One of the promising ways to overcome this challenge is found in probiotics due to their wide range of features and mechanisms of action for health promotion. Moreover, spore-forming probiotics are suitable for use in the poultry industry because of their unique ability, encapsulation, granting them protection from the harshest conditions and resulting in improved availability for hosts’ organisms. This review summarizes the information on gastrointestinal tract microbiota of poultry and their interaction with commensal and probiotic spore-forming bacteria. One of the most important topics of this review is the absence of uniformity in spore-forming probiotic trials in poultry. In our opinion, this problem can be solved by the creation of standards and checklists for these kinds of trials such as those used for pre-clinical and clinical trials in human medicine. Last but not least, this review covers problems and challenges related to spore-forming probiotic manufacturing.

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Specialist bibliographic databases offer essential online tools for researchers and authors who work on specific subjects and perform comprehensive and systematic syntheses of evidence. This article presents examples of the established specialist databases, which may be of interest to those engaged in multidisciplinary science communication. Access to most specialist databases is through subscription schemes and membership in professional associations. Several aggregators of information and database vendors, such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest, facilitate advanced searches supported by specialist keyword thesauri. Searches of items through specialist databases are complementary to those through multidisciplinary research platforms, such as PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Familiarizing with the functional characteristics of biomedical and nonbiomedical bibliographic search tools is mandatory for researchers, authors, editors, and publishers. The database users are offered updates of the indexed journal lists, abstracts, author profiles, and links to other metadata. Editors and publishers may find particularly useful source selection criteria and apply for coverage of their peer-reviewed journals and grey literature sources. These criteria are aimed at accepting relevant sources with established editorial policies and quality controls.

The relevance of this article on the topic: "Features of Investment Activity in Agriculture in the South of Russia and Ways of its Activation" is that at the present time, as a result of the systemic crisis of the Russian economy, a set of objective prerequisites for improving the financial and credit mechanisms in the agro industrial complex has been formed. The fall in the rouble exchange rate to foreign currencies made foreign agricultural products and food too expensive on the Russian market and sales fell sharply in Russia. This led to the emergence of free niches in the domestic agrarian market and increased the competitiveness of domestic agricultural products and food. In these conditions, an important task for Russian agricultural producers is to increase the volume of production and sales of agricultural products, and this requires an increase in production capacity, modernization of the material and technical base. To solve these problems, it is necessary to increase investment in the agricultural sector of the economy, which without improving the existing credit and financial system in the Russian agribusiness sector cannot be done. Based on the goal set by the authors, the subject of the study are factors and patterns that affect investment in agriculture. To write the article, dialectical methods of cognition of socioeconomic, natural-biological processes and phenomena were used as well as the systemic approach: analytical, economic-statistical, monographic, calculating and constructive and expert evaluations. This allowed working out effective measures to intensify investment activity by improving the lending process as the main source of external investment, and solving the problems of financing agricultural organizations, using non-traditional external sources of investment for agriculture in Stavropol Krai.

Abstract:The aim of this paper is to give an overview and analyze the contemporary land tenure relations in Russia in view of their influences on economic viability of agricultural production. The paper investigates progress made toward the development of agricultural land market in economies in transition. The research is made with emphasis on Stavropol Krai, agricultural region in the southern part of Russia. The authors retrospectively address land tenure relations in the region, analyze contemporary tendencies, and discover linkages between land tenure relations and sustainable agricultural development. The later concept is understood here as economic viability of agricultural production. The paper focuses on the potential approaches for resolving specific problem issues in the sphere of sustainable agricultural development through effective land tenure relations. The paper is concluded with the substantiation of methodology of land rent payment, the size of which is made conditional on land productivity and effectiveness of agricultural production. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 165

This paper contains the evaluation of agricultural resource potential; the main factors affecting the agricultural production and the