The Serbian Citation Index: Contest and Collapse

s 82.876 151.027 19.900 full texts 23.421 58.068 12.172 references 917.567 2.078.642 335.344 As a response to the CEES' "strategic move", SMS has decided to continue using SCIndeks data for evaluation purposes and to finance JBR after all. However, all journals are now required to pay the indexing fees, including some additional costs for options like the full-text availability, cited reference search and cross-linking within SCIndeks. In short, a communication failure between CEES and SMS anticipates the start of a "natural selection" process for the majority of Serbian academic journals and the collapse of the open science idea in Serbia. One aspect of this collapse is the fact that tens of thousands of papers written by the authors from Serbia are no longer available online and that additional costs are required for them to reappear. Another equally relevant issue is the profile of journals currently accessible through (what was) the national citation index. All of those journals are willing (or able) to pay the indexing fees, but just a few of them were previously classified as leading national journals. An example of this obvious compromise is the fact that although the diversity of affiliations within journal issues was strongly encouraged by both the national regulations and earlier SCIndeks inclusion guidelines, CEES indexes several journals with the majority of papers written by the authors affiliated with the journal's publishing institution.