Crisis, or Devastation in the Heads

A year ago, No. 50 TrV-N published an article “Modernization and Science” [1], which analyzed the dynamics of publication activity in various countries in recent decades. The main conclusion of the article was this. Regardless of the political system, cultural characteristics, location on the map and size of the territory, a single pattern applies: countries experiencing rapid economic, scientific and technological development demonstrate an accelerated (relative to the most developed countries of the world) growth in the number of publications in scientific journals. Even in countries that do not claim to be technological leaders, “public” science inevitably develops - they need it to ensure the training of qualified personnel capable of, if not developing, then at least being able to perceive modern technologies.

This is a general trend, but it is interesting to ask how the global economic crisis has affected science. From general considerations it is clear that the impact of the crisis is unlikely to have been beneficial: due to economic difficulties, companies are reducing investments in research and development; states, struggling to reduce budget deficits, are also not inclined to increase allocations for science. But what does publication activity say about what is happening?

Behind the entire planet

I looked at publication data for the last two years for 30 countries that published 10,000 or more articles in scientific journals in 2009, according to the most authoritative database of scientific publications, Web of Science, Thomson Reuters Corporation. It includes information on publications in more than 10 thousand of the most authoritative scientific journals in the world (including Russian ones) in the natural, technical, humanities and social sciences.

For the USA, Japan, Canada, and developed European countries, the number of publications in 2010 compared to 2009 fell by 3-6%. Some rapidly developing countries that were not particularly affected by the crisis showed an increase in the number of publications. In India, the number of publications increased by 0.3%, South Korea by 2.7%, and China by 6.4%. Iran rocketed upward, demonstrating growth of as much as 9.3%. The number of publications from Brazil, which has also grown rapidly in recent years, fell by 1%.

What about Russia? Russia, like Iran, turned out to be a record holder, but this record is sad: Russia is ahead of all countries of the world that are at least somewhat scientifically significant in terms of the rate of decline in the number of publications - 11.9%. Even Greece, struggling with a monstrous budget deficit and being saved by the whole of Europe, which is constantly shaken by strikes, showed a less disastrous result: the number of articles from Greece fell by 9.1%.

There was no such large-scale drop in the number of publications in Russia either during the default and sequestration in the 90s, or later. The exception is 2006, but then the decline was caused by purely technical reasons - a significant part of publications in Russian journals was not indexed. It is impossible to completely exclude the influence of such technical factors in 2010, however, a selective review of some journals does not give reason to assume that the story of 2006 repeated itself.

It may be recalled that Russia was also one of the champions in terms of GDP decline: in 2009, Russian GDP fell by 7.9%. However, in Russia, science is financed mainly by the state, and - even taking into account the budget cuts in 2009 compared to the initial figures - the growth of budget allocations for science in 2009 was almost 27%, which is much higher than inflation. In 2010, expenditures on citizen science were initially planned to be reduced by 4.5%, but in the end they even increased slightly, amounting to 172 billion rubles, while in 2008 about 130 billion rubles were spent on these purposes. Why, despite rising costs, has there been an extremely unfavorable trend in terms of publications? Is it only the crisis that is to blame for this?

“We have enough money, we don’t have enough intelligence”

Maybe it's not just about the money, but also how it's spent. In 2005-2009 spending on science grew and Russia showed quite decent publication dynamics: the number of publications from our country in these years increased by 14.5%, which exceeds the typical growth for other G8 countries. Nature of expenses in 2005-2008 was relatively friendly for scientific groups and ordinary researchers: in proportion to the general increase in expenses, the budget of leading scientific foundations increased; in 2006-2008. A pilot project was implemented at the Russian Academy of Sciences, which led to a significant increase in official salaries and salaries of scientific employees.

But since 2009, the situation began to change: not only were salaries frozen, but the share of leading scientific foundations in spending on civilian research and development began to decline. In 2010, the situation worsened even more: expenses for the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Humanitarian Foundation were reduced in absolute terms, and expenses for scientific programs of the Russian Academy of Sciences were also reduced. Thus, the situation with competitive financing of scientific groups, which are the main producers of scientific products, has sharply worsened.

Perhaps the main reason for the sharp drop in the number of Russian publications in 2010 is the reorientation towards funding high-profile megaprojects, rather than funding directly working scientists and research groups, as well as the growing bureaucratic hyper-regulation of both the process of obtaining funds and the process of spending them.

Of course, an additional opportunity has emerged for scientific groups to receive competitive funding for research work: in 2009, the Federal Target Program “Scientific and Scientific-Pedagogical Personnel of Innovative Russia” was launched. The money allocated to support scientific and educational centers and scientific groups within the framework of this program is not so small: in 2010, only for activities 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.5 of the Federal Target Program “Personnel” 8.2 billion rubles were allocated. However... Competitions of the Federal Target Program “Personnel” are held according to the rules of Federal Law No. 94-FZ with all its “charms” - dominance in assessing the contract price, the inability to submit more than one application from an organization, a bureaucratic and inconvenient application procedure, etc. Therefore, competitions within Federal targeted programs cannot be a full-fledged replacement for the most effective mechanism for financing scientific groups—scientific foundations.

However, this is the opinion of scientists, but is it confirmed by numbers? Yes, it is confirmed. Typically, the organization funding the project recommends that when publishing articles, it is recommended that the work be supported by the organization. This requirement is not always strictly observed; In addition, in some cases (Federal Target Program "Personnel") this requirement is fixed in the state contract, but in other cases (scientific programs of the Russian Academy of Sciences) there are no strict requirements. However, based on such links, it is possible to establish how important the activities of a particular organization are for science, taking advantage of the fact that in recent years the Web of Science database has begun to record links to support from funding organizations when entering articles into the database .

Table 1. Competitive research support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Education and Science (according to Web of Science)

The total number of articles from Russia in 2010, according to Web of Science, amounted to 27.8 thousand. Table 1 shows data on the three Russian government agencies that make the largest contribution to competitive funding of scientific research: information on the number of articles containing a link to support from these structures, and, for reference, data on the RFBR budget (the actual competitive costs are slightly less) and estimated information on the volume of competitive funding for scientific research from relevant departments in 2010.

Considering that Web of Science takes into account publications not only in the field of natural and exact sciences, in support of which the RFBR specializes, but publications across the entire spectrum of scientific activity, more than a third of Russian articles contain links to support from the RFBR. This is many times more than any other Russian government agency.

The volume of competitive research funding from various departments is not always easy to estimate, but the Russian Foundation for Basic Research is definitely not a leader in this regard. Based on data on the volume of competitive funding for scientific research in the “central part” of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the volume of funding for scientific programs of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and branches of the Russian Academy of Sciences, equal to 2 billion rubles [2]), we can estimate the volume of competitive funding for scientific programs in the Russian Academy of Sciences at approximately 3 billion rubles . Even taking into account that about 20% of the expenses for activities 1.1-1.5 of the Federal Target Program “Personnel” goes to defense and social and humanitarian topics, from which it is difficult to expect a noticeable publication output, recorded by Web of Science, within the framework of this Federal Target Program for competitive support of “public science” spent no less than by the RFBR. “Exploratory research” is being financed, albeit not on such a large scale, and within the framework of other federal targeted programs (“research and development”, “development of nanotechnology”, etc.).

One should not, of course, expect that the number of articles should be directly proportional to the expenses of a given year, but the conclusion is obvious: the Russian Foundation for Basic Research is indeed the most significant and effective of all Russian state organizations that conduct competitive funding of scientific research.

Money for megaprojects

But our government doesn’t want to understand this yet. It increasingly prefers to give money not to directly working scientists and scientific groups, but to various kinds of large projects, the prospects for the implementation of which are painted in the most rosy colors: Russia will become a world leader in nanotechnology, a national laboratory based on the Kurchatov Institute will become a forge of science and technology of the 21st century , a Russian Silicon Valley will be created in Skolkovo... Approximately 100 billion rubles from the budget may be spent from the budget until 2015 alone to finance the Skolkovo project.

Reality usually, to put it mildly, does not quite live up to expectations. In this regard, it is worth looking at what happened to the publication activity of various Russian scientific organizations in 2009-2010.

Table 2. Number of publications of some Russian organizations according to Web of Science

As you can see, the RAS suffered the least: despite the reduction in its budget, the Academy showed a drop in publication output even less than the Russian average - 11.4%. It is interesting to note that high-profile projects in recent years - the Southern and Siberian Federal Universities, as well as the Kurchatov Institute - showed results even worse than the Russian average - 13 and 13.4%, respectively. Moreover, if the funding of the two mentioned federal universities has recently begun to decline, then the costs of the breakthrough national laboratory led by M.V. Kovalchuk are only growing. Unbiased figures show the true value of his statements that “with the advent of the convergent Kurchatov NBIC Center, Russian science has created a foundation for decades that will provide us with a leading position among the leading scientific centers of the world” [3].

It should be noted here that when searching for data on various organizations, a certain number of references are inevitably lost, since the full name of the organizations is not always indicated: RAS institutes do not always indicate their academic affiliation, and institutes within Moscow State University do not always indicate their university affiliation. Probably, something is lost for the Kurchatov Institute, however, when searching, I used various options for the name of the institute, and, I believe, the losses for the RRC “KI” are no greater than for other organizations. And most importantly, publication dynamics are much more revealing than absolute numbers. Therefore, Mikhail Kovalchuk’s complaints that critics do not take something into account are baseless.

It is not difficult to understand why megaprojects do not produce serious results in our conditions. Decisions about funding these projects are usually made either under the influence of lobbying or on the basis of PR and political considerations. And in this case, money reaches scientists by seeping through the thickness of the bureaucracy, which decides - and with tangible benefit for itself - how and what to spend it on. As a result, scientists write and write various kinds of reports, and millions and billions are poured into poorly repaired buildings and expensive equipment gathering dust, on which there is no one to work.

Another problem is the ever-increasing bureaucratization. The Federal Target Program “Personnel”, which became a more significant source of budget funding in 2010 than the RFBR, as already mentioned, is much more bureaucratic both in terms of filing applications and in terms of reporting, so people are spending more and more energy on empty paperwork . Not only the receipt, but also the expenditure of funds is becoming the object of increasingly minute and strict regulation. The last step in this direction was the change by the Ministry of Economic Development of the nomenclature of goods and services, which led to the collapse of procurement in a number of organizations, about which TrV-N wrote a lot.

Thus, perhaps the main reason for the sharp drop in the number of Russian publications in 2010 is the reorientation towards funding high-profile megaprojects, rather than funding directly working scientists and research groups, as well as the growing bureaucratic hyper-regulation of both the process of obtaining funds and the process of spending them.

In this context, it is impossible not to say one more thing. Officials often say that money should be spent on practically significant results, that Russia is too poor a country to support fundamental science. Is it so? It is worth turning to the experience of other BRIC countries and other neighbors around the globe. More on this in the next issue of TrV-N.

1. E. Onishchenko. Modernization and science, No. 50, 03.30.2010 http://trv-science.ru/2010/03/30/modernizaciya-i-nauka/ .

2. Resolution “On fundamental research programs of the Russian Academy of Sciences for 2010” dated 02.02.2010 on the website www.ras.ru.

3. M.V. Kovalchuk. "Kurchatov Center for Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive Technologies." Proceedings of the XIV International Symposium “Nanophysics and Nanoelectronics”, Nizhny Novgorod, March 15-19, 2010, vol. 1, p. 5-6.