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The theme of the new contest “Oriented fundamental scientific research on relevant interdisciplinary themes” by the RFFI, unfortunately, is no longer surprising: it is a logical continuation of the policy of the current leadership of the Fund. About this - an article by scientific. sore. Fian, member of the CS Trade Union of RAS Workers Yevgeny Onishchenko .
On February 29, 2016, the Russian government issued order No. 352, which provides for the reorganization of the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (RFFI) and the Russian Humanitarian Scientific Fund (RGNF) by joining the RFNF to the RFFI. Vice-Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich commented on the order, indicating that the form of integration was proposed based on the ratio of funding funds, and the purpose of the unification is to increase the volume of interdisciplinary research, the possibility of obtaining new knowledge at the junction of the branches of sciences, as well as a reduction in the volume of administrative costs.
Representatives of the humanities, having learned about the government’s disposal, expressed fears whether the RFNF will be connected to the RFFF to the fact that some activities specific to the humanities (for example, the publication of multi -volume dictionaries) will be without the support of the United Fund. It seems, however, that the continuation of the policy of the current leadership of the RFFIA poses a threat not only for the humanities.
You can look differently at the accession of the RGNF to the RFFF, but one doubt there is no doubt: the unification of the funds will contribute to “increasing the volume of interdisciplinary research”, the importance of which with worthy of the best application has been stubbornly at the very top, as if interdisciplinary is a panacea, and affixing a “interdisciplinary” show next to the name of the study automatically leads to its high-high name relevance and effectiveness.
The current leadership of the RFFIF has long been actively promoting the need and the importance of highlighting relevant directions and support for interdisciplinary research. The share of “interdisciplinary” contests in the fund’s budget is growing: if in 2015, 18% of the RFFIF budget was sent to finance “oriented fundamental research on relevant interdisciplinary topics”, then in 2016 it is planned to send about 20% of the fund’s budget for these purposes. For comparison, the main competition - the competition of initiative projects in the fields of knowledge “A” - in 2016 it is planned to allocate approximately 41% of the RFFI budget, while 63% of the fund’s budget took 10 years ago for these purposes.
The highlight of interdisciplinary competitions is that, under the pretext of relevance and interdisciplinary, projects supported within their framework have several times higher funding than ordinary type A grants. It is clear that when selecting topics, representatives of the fund leadership consider their and close topics the most relevant. At the same time, as a long time, the vast majority of supported in the framework of interdisciplinary competitions of projects could be in a completely natural way to receive support in the framework of ordinary competitions in fields of knowledge.
Such simplicity in the approach to the allocation of “themselves and their” grants has been criticized for several years; The illegality of this approach was mentioned in the official appeals of the Society of Scientists and the documents of the Council for Science under the Ministry of Education and Science, but, as they say, now there.
Among the latest topics of the “interdisciplinary” competitions, for example, this can be found: “Modern methods of crystallography and photonics for the study and creation of promising materials and optical elements” [1]. In the annotation to the topic, in particular, it is said: “This competition is based on a convergent approach that combines crystallography as a science of structural conditioning of the properties of materials and a photonic, which opens up wide opportunities in creating materials with predetermined properties. In the subject of the competition, the emphasis is on the structural aspect when constructing new effective materials and elements of photonics based on them and the study of the processes of forming the structure of materials in technological processes. ”
Apparently, the authors of the text suggest that until now, scientists who are studying the structural and optical properties of solid bodies, as well as heterostructures, did not suspect each other's existence, and the structures and volumetric materials themselves were grown by technologists who did not suspect the existence of the first two groups of scientists. And therefore, it is impossible to support this kind of projects in the framework of the general competition in physics-only a photon-critical convergence will help researchers learn about the existence of each other and make contacts.
But this, I repeat, is the usual and familiar cunning, and in mid -February 2016, the RFFIF took a new step in the development of relevant interdisciplinaryism: it was announced about the additional topic of the 2016 competition of oriented fundamental research on relevant interdisciplinary topics - “Creation of methods and support for decision -making on innovative development of the Russian Federation” [2].
They reached: the fund was pretended to finance fundamental research on the funds of decision -making on the innovative development of Russia. Traditionally, the lots of the identification and development of innovative potential, monitoring, long-term scientific and technological forecasting, etc. The Ministry of Education and Science was generously financed, the creation of technological platforms was carried out, etc. However, it seems that in the conditions of a reduction in budget financing of science the Ministry of the Ministry of the Russian Federation seemed insufficient, and it decided to throw the last reserves into battle, approaching the problem, approaching the problem, approaching the problem, approaching the problem of Even more fundamental and scientifically.
"Chumazy cannot play!"
In the film “Unfinished Play for a Mechanical Piano”, the character performed by Oleg Tabakov emotionally exclaims: “Chumazy cannot play!” - Refining that commoners are not able to play the piano. A similar statement can also be found in the annotation to the current innovative topic: “Over the past 20 years, in all software documents offering strategy and the development of the national scientific and technological complex, the Russian scientific knowledge generation sector is evaluated as insufficiently effective.
One of the reasons for this indicates the inability of domestic scientific groups to realize a full cycle of fundamental, search and applied research and, as a result, the impossibility of creating competitive technologies in demand by the economy. ”
Superburationly indicating that not a government policy is to blame for the non -competitiveness of the economy, but not a good people, the authors of the annotations have moved to urgent tasks: “In connection with this president of the Russian Federation, the task of radical increase in the use of federal budget funds allocated for civil science, and, first of all, to develop its priority areas. As a tool for solving this problem, it is proposed to develop a “unified and intelligible criterion for using resources” . In the context of reducing financing for scientific and technological research, it is necessary not only to identify the most promising areas of research, but also to involve the business in the financing process, which is possible only if these studies are needed to develop the business itself. ”
Mixing fundamental and applied studies in one heap, in relation to which it is impossible to develop a “unified and intelligible criterion for the use of resources”, and inserting on -duty phrases about the need to involve business into the financing process, the authors showed insufficient sequence and breadth of thought. It was necessary not to exchange for secondary tasks of allocating priority areas and increasing the efficiency of the use of budget funds, but to set the most important task-the task of the scientific substantiation of the country's innovative development in the context of reducing financing of scientific and technological research.
In the heading, 10 of the proposed topics proposed, among which, in particular, can be distinguished:
“Methods of synthesis of technology, technological chains and technological processes based on the bases of knowledge, modeling of reasoning, automatic synthesis of plans and other methods of artificial intelligence”;
“Methods of predicting the routes of innovative development of the Russian Federation and developing advanced recommendations for creating promising scientific and technical solutions and technologies using mechanisms for explanation, justification of solutions, searching for causal and associative relations”;
“Development of methods for improving the quality of expertise of scientific projects based on a reasonable system of formalized and verified criteria.”
The latter is the dream of a number of officials with whom I once had to say: their ideal would be the algorithm prescribed in the Ministry of Education and Science of the Ministry of Education and Science, which would allow appraisers to apply on the basis of accounting for indicators, without an appeal to the “subjective opinion of experts”. And this topic looks especially touching (almost like the tireless concern of our state about the development of science and technology). After all, the current leadership of the RFFIF has made noticeable efforts to ensure that the examination of projects become less objective, including creating a system of individual expert councils for contests with increased financing. This applies, for example, to "youth" competitions in which there is a separate council of representatives of different sciences.
Young everywhere we have
The Russian Youth Policy, generally speaking, is a good illustration of the old Russian proverb of the pro, speaking political correctly, a person with limited intellectual abilities, which is not characterized by a sense of proportion. Starting with the contests “My First Grant” and leading youth groups, the fund turned to more strange and slurred spotlights. Such is the competition for recently defending candidates and doctors of sciences “Mol_A_DK”, whose application forms cause bewilderment and definitely do not contribute to qualitative examination [3].
The financial conditions of this competition look no less strange. One recently defended candidate of sciences, who won in the “adult” competition of type “A”, that is, competing on equal terms with actively working scientists of all ages, receives a grant of 300-500 thousand rubles. a year, and another recently defended candidate of sciences, who won the same recently defending candidates of sciences, receives 1700 thousand rubles. per year. Where the logic is here, only the leadership of the RFFI knows.
Even more strange is the one -year youth contest “Mol_EV_A” (“Eureka! Idea”), in which “young scientists or small youth groups (up to 5 people) could take part, offering non -standard, original ideas that contribute to the development or creation of new critical technologies as part of the contest cutter” [4]. After such contests, fruitful debut ideas for a million rubles a year, really, it's time to think about improving the quality of the examination. Moreover, there are even more exciting plans ahead: in the decision of the RFFI Council of December 10, 2015, among the main areas of the fund’s activities in 2016, it is written: “Considering the possibility of supporting scientific research on talented youth based on“ through ”contests on the“ schoolboy - student -graduate student - scientific employee ”.
In principle, there is no reason to object to the conduct of thematic, youth and other specialized competitions. The question is the priorities and a quality organization of the examination. However, in conditions when there is a Russian Scientific Fund, capable of supporting the most powerful scientific groups solid grants by Russian standards, when the support of applied research in priority areas is engaged in the framework of the FCP for research and development, in the framework of the Bortnik Foundation (where there are competitions for students and graduate students, and annual competitions on a million rubles), etc., when, finally, they exist, when, they finally exist Grants and scholarships by the President of Russia for young scientists, the RFFIF should seem to be done by what he was created: primarily the support of initiative projects in the field of science.
And there are no reasons that impede the support of the projects within their framework at least in the field of “search and analysis methods in local and global information resources of scientific, technical and technological solutions corresponding to the needs of the Russian economy, using inductive machine learning methods, automatic classification and clustering of large amounts of data”, even in the field of “light-storage structures (sources of coherent radiation) Based on organic semiconductors and liquid crystals. ”
But no, the current leadership of the RFFIA pursues exclusively a conjunctural and fussy policy (of course, constantly referring to his own interests and priorities). Youth support? Now we will develop a line of contests for participants up to the school bench! Actual directions and technologies? Now we will allocate and finance! And all this feast of the human spirit occurs with a constant reduction in the real financial filling of basic type A basic grants, which are now, taking into account inflation, much more light than 7-8 years ago.
In general, in my opinion, it is incorrect to say that the humanities have serious reasons to fear the results of the unification of the RFFIF and RGNF, and representatives of natural sciences have nothing to fear. Because with the continuation of the current policy of the leadership of the RFFIF, in a few years, the RFFIF will cease to be a normal scientific fund and turn into a “saw -off”, in which projects of “their and necessary people” are intensively financed under the flag of current state priorities.
In fact, only one serious step remains to take this: to move from the allocation of those who representatives of the RFFI with increased financing of projects (under the pretext of their relevance and interdisciplinary) to the formulation of particularly important specific topics with even higher financing. As it was in the megalots of the Ministry of Education and Science of the End of the End of the previous decade. And on mass grants “to support pants” it will be possible to allocate 15–20% of the fund's budget. And it doesn’t matter that the money will be penny: as one of the representatives of the leadership of the RFFIA said at one meeting is not money, this is prestige, a kind of quality mark ...
1. Www.rfbr.ru/rffi/en/ContestS_announceement/o_1946160
2. Www.rfbr.ru/rffi/en/ContestS_announceement/o_1950316