Caution, interdisciplinary!

By 2020, the budget of the Russian Fund for fundamental research (RFFI) will reach 22.9 billion rubles. Against the current 8 billion, and the average grant will increase to 1.5 million rubles. (Now it is a little more than 400 thousand). Such indicators are laid down in the program of the Russian Federation for 2014-2020, which is now being developed in the Bureau of the Council of the RFFI. It would seem that the numbers are encouraging. Nevertheless, a number of provisions from the working copy of this document, which ended up at my disposal, plunges into shock.

So, according to developers' plans, by 2020, 70% of the number of all supported projects will be the so -called interdisciplinary and oriented fundamental studies. They will receive grants of 5-10 million rubles, which will take half the budget of the fund. Meanwhile, the number of “narrow -defiplinary” initiative projects will decrease from the current 48 to 20%; To the same size, their share in the budget of the RFFI will fall. In this situation, the costs of this most important position in absolute figures will grow slightly (up to about 4.6 billion rubles against 3.7 billion rubles in 2012), grants will become larger, but the number of supported projects will be sharply reduced.

The implementation of such plans will be a real disaster for real -working scientists, quite comparable to the government “reform” of the Russian Academy of Sciences. After all, the RFFF has long established itself as the most successful tool for supporting scientific research, created in post -Soviet Russia. The success of the fund is primarily associated with initiative projects. Even the modest size of initiative grants provides scientists with considerable freedom in the implementation of their research intentions, and a well -established examination of applications allows you to keep their level at a decent height.

It seems, however, that the Bureau of the Council of the RFFI, who was preparing his program, even without the participation of the rest of the Fund Council, decided to supplant initiative projects for the periphery. According to the developers, "an increase in the volume of financing of the Russian Federation will ensure ... reorientation from studies of narrow -dyeing nature for interdisciplinary research." "Interdisciplinary" is one of the leitmotifs of this document. Let's take a closer look at her.

On the other side of the interdisciplinary

In scientific everyday life, the word "interdisciplinaryness" is used as an innocent meme, which, as a rule, does not bear deep meaning. So, the “interdisciplinary” in the name of the seminar usually means its slightly greater openness for colleagues from the side, and sometimes the simple bad cure of the organizers. But this word is very impressive of officials and other people who are not related to scientific work.

Nevertheless, the significance of interdisciplinary research is not called into question anyone. Indeed, any scientific discipline studies its object only within a certain framework, and the desire for the fullness of its knowledge requires the synthesis of the results obtained by different disciplines. It is at their junction that many discoveries are made.

Everything is so. But for these banalities we should not forget that science itself has precisely a disciplinary structure. And that every scientific discipline is not just a number in UDC or PASC, not just a community of scientists with its journals, institutions, conferences, etc. Discipline is also certain methodological requirements for research and the researcher, developed (and sometimes suffered) by generations of scientists. In physicists, these requirements are different than in biologists or historians, but only they give reason to recognize physics, biology and history of science.

Of course, the disciplinary structure of science has not frozen forever. From time to time, new disciplines are formed, pushing the old on the periphery. Nevertheless, any serious interdisciplinary innovation requires scientists from an impeccable level of qualification in their own disciplines. Only under this condition is a productive synthesis of theories, methodologies and ethical principles of different disciplines possible. Interdisciplinaryness is the luxury that only a developed disciplinary science can afford.

It is obvious, therefore, interdisciplinary projects can only be single - despite the fact that the bulk of scientific results are obtained within the framework of the prevailing disciplines. Stimulating interdisciplinary research when coagulating support for traditional scientific disciplines seems absurd. But it is precisely this absurdity that was laid down in the program of the RFFI for 20142020. Its developers obviously want to put interdisciplinary on the stream, make it a massive product.

In the best case, such an ideology will only lead to a stream of profanity. Say, almost any paleontological work can be presented as an interdisciplinary project with the participation of biologists and geologists. Banal statistical data processing can also be declared an interdisciplinary study, it remains only to include professional mathematics in the project.

In the worst case, the expansion of interdisciplinary is fraught with erosion of the basic principles and values ​​of scientific research, supported only in the framework of existing disciplines. Astrology or creationism - why not interdisciplinary directions that are unfairly denied grants? Apparently, the developers of the program intend to eliminate this drawback.

Who benefits

The program in the program is not just about interdisciplinary, but about "interdisciplinary and oriented fundamental research." There is reason to believe that “interdisciplinary” is only a new label for the “Officials” contests.

Unlike the usual competitions of the RFFF, the Official contests are held on a fairly narrow topic, specially “sharpened” for a particular artist. In the same scheme, unscrupulous participants in tenders apply: they formulate technical tasks in such a way as to cut off the suppliers “from the side”. The visibility of the competitive selection of applications remains, but, unlike initiative projects, funds are distributed according to some opaque procedures. And we are talking about large grants that are several million rubles a year.

Symptomatic, for example, such a case. In the 2011 Officer competition, subsection was announced 1.04. Applications of probability theory and mathematical statistics to the problems of restoration of dependencies and classification according to full and incomplete data. Applications of the theory of functions and orthogonal systems to the tasks of calculating optimization, including impairment methods. ” Among the 8 applications submitted to it, the winner of the project had exactly the same name. Grant received a recently deceased academician Yu.V. Prokhorov ( www.scientific.ru/dforum/scilife/1306295612 ).

Interdisciplinary so.

A little statistics

In the project of the Development Program of the RFFI, Government documents, decrees of the President, premiuming indicators appear - the number of publications in leading data databases (Web of Science, Scopus), the average number of quotes of articles, etc. Let's try to figure out how different types of grants look from this point of view. According to the estimates of E.E. Onishchenko, who conducted a continuous program viewing of records of the sixth part of the publications of Russian scientists indexed in the Web of Science database in 2012, initiative projects supported about 86% of the number of scientific works that received funding from the Russian Federation. At the same time, 66% of such articles contained links only to RFFIF grants with index “A” (i.e. initiative projects). In 2012, it took, however, only 48.9% of the fund’s budget ( www.rfbr.ru/rffi/ru/about/n_770 ).

In the same 2012, 15.5% of the RFFI budget was spent on “oriented fundamental research”. We have no data on the number of articles published precisely with their support. But if it is known that all types of grants, except for initiative (i.e., on oriented, international, regional, youth (for obvious reasons, who gave a fairly modest publication output in 2012), to support mobility, etc.), there are 34% of publications, then the “Officials” contributions are unlikely to exceed their share in the budget, that is, 15%. And this is an optimistic assessment. Thus, even gross deposits show that initiative grants work at least a third more efficiently than “Officials” grants.

It could be assumed that grants of the "Officer" type are taken not by the number of publications, but by their higher quality. From a scientific point of view, this would be evidenced by higher on average impact factors of magazines, which publish articles based on the results of “special-ejectors with increased financing”. However, the data of E.E. Onishchenko does not confirm this. 67% of the articles published in journals with an impact factor exceeding 2, containing a link only to RFFI support, refer to support only grants with index “A”. This corresponds to the number of Russian publications containing links to support for such grants.

Thus, there is no reason to believe that the quality of selection in oriented and interdisciplinary competitions of the RFFI, earnestly developed by the current leadership of the Fund, allows you to select projects of a higher scientific level, giving the most significant results. It is the initiative projects with index “A” that were and remain the system -forming component of the work of the RFFI. And it is precisely they should be developed in the first place, if the state is really interested in good recovery from funds allocated to fundamental science. Although, of course, the mechanisms of competitive selection, examination, financing of initiative projects also need to be improved.

It seems that the developers of the new RFFI development program think differently. They intend to put almost the entire alleged increase in the funding of the Fund on grants “for their own”, and it will be done under the sign of “Interdisciplinary”. With such a policy, the RFFIF will quickly turn into another mini-Skolkovo or Rusnano. Well, cutting chicken that carries gold eggs in Rus' is not the first time. Just do not then talk about the development of competitive financing of research groups, and simply about the normal development of domestic science.

For a scientist working in Russia (especially on the periphery), the initiative grant of the RFFIF means much more than just a money amount. Such a grant is also a chance for professional survival in the social environment for which science is alien and hostile. He gives the researcher the Tolik of Independence from those feudal and communal relations that determine too much in Russian scientific life. Is this not why the Bureau of the Russian Federation Council, which includes M. Kovalchuk and his two subordinates, are tended to let these grants under the knife?

Alexey Oskolsky,
doct. Biol. sciences leading a researcher at the Botanical Institute
them. V.L. Komarova RAS (St. Petersburg)