The rigid attitude of the departments that govern our science, practiced for several years, on the growth of the number of scientific publications in English-language international peer-reviewed journals, leads to sad results. One of them is the gradual ousting of the Russian language from the scientific sphere. Others are imitating the scientific process. The third is a threat to national security.
Recently, the Academic Council of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences published an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin (copies to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev, Minister of Higher Education and Science Valery Falkov) with a request to intervene and stop the adoption of the new "Methodology for calculating the integrated score of publication performance", developed by the Ministry of Education and Science and sent to scientific institutions as a directive for implementation.
To begin with, we just give detailed quotes from an open letter from the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences:
The national orientation of the social and humanitarian sciences in Russia is under attack (…) This is not at all about the details of the technique for calculating the effectiveness of scientific organizations, and even not only about the fact that it ignores the laws of development of the social and humanitarian sciences.
It is about preserving the integrity, coherence and unity of the spiritual and cultural space and the continuity of the historical development of Russia (…).
Is it too loud a statement?
The authors of the letter explain: “The meaning of the proposed“Methodology”is that the criteria for assessing the social and humanitarian sphere are taken out of the country and given to two commercial foreign companies - Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. This is not the case in any of the developed countries of the world. As a result, the vector of scientific activity in the socio-humanitarian sphere will be determined by the policies of these organizations, and not by their own logic and needs of Russian science and not by the domestic scientific community."
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The directive sent out by the Ministry of Education and Science says that "the provisions of the methodology have been repeatedly discussed with representatives of leading scientific and educational organizations, the RAS and the RAS trade union." However, many scientists, it turned out, "neither sleep nor spirit" …
Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Candidate of Philosophy Polina Gadzhikurbanova told Tsargrad that they had not heard anything at the institute about any preliminary discussion of this method:
“All this was like snow on our heads for us. Instead of the number of publications already planned in accordance with the state assignment for 2020, which we have already discussed with employees, a completely new task comes - to achieve a certain indicator of the "composite score of publication performance". For each publication its "cost" is determined in points. Moreover, the largest number of points is awarded for articles in journals that occupy high positions in the Web of Science, and only 1 point is awarded for monographs. At an explanatory webinar that the ministry held for representatives of scientific organizations, we were assured that if the institute does not reach the proposed indicator, this will not entail a reduction in its funding. But it is hard to believe in this: non-fulfillment of the state assignment entails the return of budget funds.
In general, the number of publications cannot grow infinitely from year to year - this is absurd. We are offered not to engage in science, but to produce, figuratively speaking, certain products: so many white bricks, so many red ones. Some are "cheaper", others are "more expensive". At the same time, it is not taken into account that our main products are not magazine articles at all, but books, monographs. Only to this extent can a philosophical question be thoroughly posed, a problem can be formulated and what you have arrived at. In addition, for the collection of humanitarian journals in the Web of Science, impact factors are not counted at all and quartiles are not assigned (numerical indicators of citation of articles published in this scientific journal. - Approx. Tsargrad). But we are required to publish in journals with a high quartile in WoSe, which, in principle, is impossible."
Does Russia need the humanities?
On the one hand, we have a lot of people writing and talking - recently even from high tribunes - about the importance of developing what is called the English-language term "High-hume" - high humanitarian technologies, which today define on a par with military-technological level and success in exact sciences, sovereign and sustainable development of countries. On the other hand, they are directly ruining this development, redirecting scientists to Anglo-Saxon scientometric centers, reformatting their consciousness and even the very language of research.
The question of assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of various scientific disciplines in Russia, which has become more acute today, was raised more than a decade ago. When for science, which was starving and scattered in the 1990s - in the early 2000s, budget allocations sharply increased. And after waiting a little, they did not see the creative result. And what, in fact, can be the quick results in fundamental science? This is not baking pies: today I invested a ruble, and tomorrow I received three. Then they decided to put at the forefront the scientometric method in the Western version: when the success of a scientific work is measured in the number of articles and references in the so-called "peer-reviewed" journals according to the list of international scientometric databases, the main of which are WoS and Scopus.
* The hypertrophied emphasis on the Web of Science and Scopus leads to the ousting of the Russian language from the sphere of social sciences and humanities, and in the long term - - and from the sphere of intellectual culture *. Photo: Victor Drachev / TASS.
The vast majority of such publications are English-language ones published in America and Great Britain. There are also peer-reviewed domestic scientific journals included in the list of the Higher Attestation Commission, as well as in the specially developed Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). The nuance is that according to the system of evaluation adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science, publications in our journals "weigh" much less than foreign ones. And in the new methodology, the RSCI is completely ignored! In addition, Western scientometric systems poorly take into account monographs, books, textbooks - that is, the most adequate form of scientific achievements in the humanitarian sphere. At the same time, in technical sciences, for example, patents for inventions remain “overboard” in assessing the quality of the work of an institute or an individual scientist.
It is practically impossible for "lyricists" to achieve the same quantitative indicators as those of "physicists", the top of which is the notorious integral Hirsch index, repeatedly played by scientists in obscene jokes. But after all, representatives of the exact sciences, in order to fulfill the ministerial plan, are often compelled, instead of advanced and risky (in the sense of immediate recognition) research, to take on "mainstream" topics, small achievements in which will sooner be published in foreign journals and more likely to be cited.
Some will ask: why, in fact, scientists are obliged to fulfill these guidelines of the ministry? The answer is as simple as a moo: because the category of funding for their institutions and their own salary directly depend on this.
Do you want science or Hirsha?
Our people are quick-witted and resourceful. Do you need journal publications, not science? Not discoveries, but the Hirsch index? Okay! Over the years, both junior researchers and directors and professors have gotten used to writing "passable" articles, "cross-pollination" of authors' groups of such publications. Demand gave birth to an offer: payment - for the required publication, secret sale of links, "winding up" the citation index, scams with affiliation - the author's belonging to a certain scientific institution or team. A whole market for the fabrication and promotion of "scientific" articles has emerged. What is the bottom line? Imitation of scientific activity, fraud, "bullshit" - in the camp jargon. That was recently acknowledged by the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Sergeev, stating that two-thirds of our products (scientific publications. - Approx. Tsargrad) are "rubbish". And according to the estimates of many scientists,not even two-thirds, but nine-tenths!
And again the officials had to think about how to cope with this: on the one hand, continue to rely on the "journal factor" in assessing the effectiveness of scientists, but at the same time somehow curb the prolific imitators and outright swindlers.
And so they came up with a new integral counting system, which seems to match the quantity and quality of scientific publications in coefficients with terrible abbreviations. KBPR (Composite Publication Performance Score) is intended for planning government assignments to institutes, and PRND (Scientific Performance Indicator) was created to assess the work of researchers.
This terribly complex and intricate system was proposed as a universal tool to absolutely all institutions subordinate to the Ministry of Education and Science. And these include, recall, and academic institutes of the humanities, and medical and agricultural research institutes. At the same time, according to the new system, in order to maintain the previous category of funding, everyone needs to dramatically increase the number and "quality" of articles in peer-reviewed journals within a year - with the former absolute priority of "foreign" publications.
The extent of the disaster was not immediately realized. Philosophers were the first to sound the alarm. In their open letter, they explain to the officials:
The most important and topical topics of Russian social sciences and domestic humanities can and should be discussed primarily in Russian, in the Russian scientific community and public space, and not in Western journals, which often bypass these problems for reasons of both thematic and ideological-political orientation …
We Russian scientists
The Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences emphasizes: "The hypertrophied emphasis on Web of Science and Scopus leads to the ousting of the Russian language from the sphere of social sciences and humanities, and in the future from the sphere of intellectual culture."
No, really: if your physical survival depends on English-language publications, wouldn't it be more effective to learn to write in English right away? And then - and think!
In this sense, the numerous Anglicisms, which are sometimes forced, and more often for the sake of fashion, are equipped with the language of scientific publications - this is only "the beginning of diseases." The end will, obviously, be the transition to the Latin alphabet, as the especially ardent Bolshevik internationalists wanted after the revolution.
Once our great scientist Mikhailo Lomonosov, overcoming the dominance of German and French scientific terminology, introduced into everyday life the words: "experience", "object", "phenomenon", "mine", "pendulum", "drawing" and many others. And now they want to force us to "talk" even in the sovereign regions - the Russian Word, Russian Thought, Russian History.
Following the philosophers, a protest against the new directive of the Ministry of Education and Science was expressed by the Academic Council of the Institute of World Literature. A. M. Gorky (IMLI RAS). The open letter of literary scholars, in particular, says: "Beyond the limits of taking into account efficiency and effectiveness, there are studies (…) that form the national and cultural heritage of our country." And further it is specified: “For literary critics and folklorists, the introduction of this practice means“leaving out of the brackets”the main, most fundamental and scientifically significant activity - work on academic collections of works and monuments of world literature, fundamental literary histories, serial publications such as“Literary heritage”and Literary monuments ".
The summary of their assessment of the ministerial "Methodology" sounds very harsh:
Academician-secretary of the Department of Historical and Philological Sciences of the Academy Valery Tishkov expressed a similar critical assessment of the document in his letter to the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And then the Academic Council of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) RAS. It can be assumed that the number of "Protestants" will continue to grow.
RAS: fight with the head
At the meeting of the RAS Presidium held on February 11, where the new head of the Ministry of Education and Science Valery Falkov arrived with his three deputies, it was "hot". A detailed report on new standards for publication performance was made by Deputy Minister Sergei Kuzmin and Scientific Secretary of the Physics Institute. P. N. Lebedev RAS Andrey Kolobov. The chairman of the meeting, RAS President Alexander Sergeev, put forward the thesis that the proposed "Method" is reasonable, although it needs improvement, since it was adopted in a hurry because of the "financial year" deadline. However, despite this conciliatory "artillery preparation", some academicians spoke out sharply against it. Moreover, criticism was voiced not only from the part of the humanities.
Representatives of agricultural sciences spoke with bewilderment and anger about "scientometric insanity". One of them, recalling the "Doctrine of Food Security of the Russian Federation" approved by Putin, asked the question: "How will we do this if we do not restore the lost seed fund, grow new varieties, develop methods to increase yields, but look for foreign magazines where we could to print at least something, since these publications are not interested in all of the above? " In conclusion, he expressed the wish that all scientific research institutes of agro-science were finally transferred, "following normal logic," to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture.
However, the harsh criticism of the Methodology developed by the Ministry of Education and Science was met in response by the categorical "shock" of the presiding officer: "Suggest your own methodology for assessing the effectiveness of your institute." And the attempt of one of the speakers to "dig" into the root of the problem - "Why do we generally assess the quality of scientific work through publications?" - provoked a harsh rebuke: "Let's not talk now about how good science was under the USSR and how bad it is now."
The current president of the Russian Academy of Sciences is quite understandable: he, like his predecessor, is in fact in an ambiguous position: deprived of the management of academic institutions, between the hammer of the Kremlin and the hard place of his fellow scientists. And the task before him is "tough": by means of compromises to save what is still left of academic science.
Where are we sailing, cap?
The impossibility of the “way back” was also discussed at a joint press conference with Alexander Sergeev by the new head of the Ministry of Education and Science, Valery Falkov. The impossibility of neither returning the RAS to its institutes selected as a result of the 2013 reform, much less a return to Soviet prosperity, when the state allocated money for fundamental science, without linking it with scientometric reports.
In response to a question from Constantinople about the protest of philosophers, literary critics and historians, Valery Nikolayevich, in a mild diplomatic manner, promised to meet with the research teams of these institutes, make the necessary adjustments, and settle the conflict situation. Well, what else could he answer?
Falkov can also be understood: he just came to a place with, to put it mildly, a complex "legacy", the current "Methodology" was not developed under him. On the contrary, he has already managed to abolish the ridiculous "special rules" of interaction of Russian scientists with foreign colleagues, introduced by his predecessor in the ministerial post. Probably, some kind of correction will take place in scientometrics, the removal of the most ridiculous impossible requirements. Perhaps even the "steering sciences" will realize that physicists and biologists should not be cut with the same brush as the humanities and agrarians.
In general, you can understand everyone. Yes, that's just the end? Is Russian science heading in that direction, or rather, leading? Of course, reporting on budget funds spent is also important in this area. Physicist Lev Artsimovich's ingenious formula “Science is the best way to satisfy personal curiosity at the expense of the state” is not comme il faut today. But, perhaps, on the way of control and accounting, it is worth trying not to trail in trailers behind Anglo-Saxon locomotives in alien coordinate systems?
No, not to withdraw into oneself, which is stupid and impossible in science, but to finally build your own evaluative abscissa and ordinate, returning both a part of the Soviet experience and what was born in our country, but not developed. For example, the findings and methods of the outstanding Russian mathematician and philosopher Vasily Nalimov, who, in fact, introduced the term "scientometrics" into scientific circulation.
And Hirshi to us then your Scopuses?
Author: Samokhin Andrey