The purpose and ways of presenting the key dates delineating the individual stages of the life cycle of a modern scientific publication are considered. For the author who plans to publish his work in a particular journal, the most interesting dates are the dates of the preliminary stages: reviewing, proofreading, layout, etc. The key date, usually reflected in the bibliographic reference to the published work, is the year of its publication. It is necessary to distinguish between the title year appearing on the cover and in the bibliographic reference, and the actual year recorded in the output of the publication. The title and actual years in some cases may not coincide, which often leads to various misunderstandings. With the advent of the Internet, other dates are also included in the consideration, in particular, the date of application and the date of posting. The date of application is included in the bibliographic reference to indicate when the author of the publication got acquainted with the cited work, which may have been subsequently changed. The posting date is especially relevant for alive online publications, the authors of which constantly keep their work up to date, eliminating the inaccuracies noticed and, most importantly, reflecting the latest achievements in the field under consideration. Here, the reader is particularly interested in the date of posting the latest, fresh version of the publication online. In an online publication, a fresh date can be obtained “on the fly” at the place of its posting and then dynamically embedded directly into the text of the bibliographic reference presented to the reader. This significantly increases the informative value of the reference. The implementation of a dynamic posting date is analyzed for a direct hyperlink to an alive publication, for a hyperlink via a DOI obtained from Crossref, and for a hyperlink to a preprint in arXiv.org.

The article considers the system of information support of Russian scientific research in the field of natural sciences process. It’s gradual creating and development based on the creation of hybrid scientific library, using both the local (located directly in the library) traditional collection, and collections of electronic full-text media available remotely to the library patron and being a virtual part of the whole library collection.

The article deals with the use of scientific journals (mainly foreign) as the most important part of the scientific resources required by Russian scientists’ access. The analysis is based on the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (one of the leading scientific libraries in Russia) example.

The mentioned process started in the last centuries 1990s, and, as shown in the article, passes through several stages. From the very beginning, the process required for the libraries to unite into associations for the electronic resources joint use. These associations took, in accordance with international experience, the form of library consortia. At the first stage, consortia were created to bring together several libraries to access the electronic resources of a single foreign library.

This system turned out to be viable, but rather cumbersome for a library (for effective work a library has to be a member of several consortia, which turned out to be non-technological). At the next stage, a single consortium was created with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research — Scientific Electronic Library RFBR. Further development required the direct state on the one of the Ministry of Higher Education and Science projects basis support. This process went through several development stages (using as a project operator consortium NEICON, the RNPLS&T and again RFBR — at another level of organization and funding).

As a result, by 2020 the providing mainly information support for the work of the main mass of scientific and educational institutions in the specified field system was created and debugged on the practical level. By the early 2020s, the work had entered a more or less stable working mode.

The issues requiring an urgent solution are the lack of an insurance copy of resources purchased abroad, which creates an uncertain situation in the event of the relationship with the resource owner termination, and the absence, in full, of a similar access to Russian scientific resources system, if their publication rights, in part, have been transferred to foreign publishers.

Promotion of e-resources in library settings remains to be an obstacle for its efficient use. There are three main reasons of insufficient use of e-resources: majority of users remain to be unaware of availability of e-collections in their institutions, lack of searching skills among end-users, low level of competency among librarians on e-resources and e-platforms. The lack of support and training of end-users results in poor usage of research oriented e-resources, especially foreign ones. Recommendations for librarians on promotion of e-resources include redesign of library website as main entry-point to e-collections, correct URLs to publisher platforms and their correct description, information on access options, availability of end-user emails for notification purposes — these and many other tips are important for efficient usage of acquired e-resources for research and educational purposes.

Currently, there are a number of automated services for selecting journals for the publication of scientific articles, which are an auxiliary tool for the author when choosing a scientific journal. The article provides an overview and comparative analysis of services for selecting a journal for publishing an article (Master Journal List Manuscript Matcher, JournalFinder, Journal Suggester, JournalGuide, Wiley Journal Finder, NeuroAssistant of Scientific Publishing), which are available free of charge and provide the ability to automatically select journals by analyzing fragment of the manuscript and additional parameters. As a result of the study, it was revealed that of the considered services, Master Journal List Manuscript Matcher (for foreign journals) and NeuroAssistant of Scientific Publishing (for Russian-language journals) are more preferable, because give the most relevant list of journals.

Introduction. Entry into science should occur from the first year of university. One of the main barriers is the inability to work with scientific information. In order to improve the competitiveness of students in the scientific environment, a study of the level of information culture of students enrolled in the first year of undergraduate studies was conducted.

Materials and methods. The main research method is a selective Internet questionnaire survey. The main method of information analysis is the method of constructing typologies, the essence of which is to find such empirical indicators that would sufficiently adequately reflect the levels of competitiveness in research activities and the corresponding types of applicants to a technical university in the digital era.

Results. During the survey, it was revealed that the majority of respondents do not have an understanding of the basics of design as a method of work, there are no skills in building an experiment, using methods of analysis and synthesis, there is no understanding of the importance of publishing the results of their work. More than 90 % of respondents have an average level of information culture with good skills in owning applied office programs.

Discussion and conclusions. It was concluded that in order to achieve competitiveness in the scientific environment of students, it is necessary to teach information culture almost from scratch.