It is impossible to support

Perhaps there was no event that caused in the first half of 2015 a more stringent reaction of the scientific community than the project published on April 14, 2015 “Methodological recommendations for the distribution of subsidies provided by federal state institutions performing work in the field of scientific (research) and scientific and technical activity”. Despite the boring name, the document developed by the Ministry of Education and Science, the document promised a cardinal change in the principles of financing state scientific organizations in that part, which was previously called “basic financing”.

In the existing legal reality, “basic” financing does not exist. Instead, scientific organizations, as well as budget organizations in other areas of activity, founders - the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations (Fano), Ministry of Education and Science, etc. - distinguish subsidies for the implementation of the state assignment. For scientific institutions, such a task is to carry out research on the established (“planned”) topic.

The Ministry of Education and Science proposed to distribute the main part of these funds on a competitive basis, ensuring targeted support for structural units of institutions and scientists who have reached high scientific (scientific and technical) results ”(leading laboratories and leading researchers). The comparison of the stipulated standards for financing the units selected by the competition and leading researchers with the total financing of the scientific institutions of the Fano led to an unambiguous conclusion: in the event of the implementation of the voiced plans, the number of Fano researchers should be reduced at least three times. This, obviously, would be a blow of a tremendous destructive force in Russian science. It was also naive that in conditions when the main driving force would be the instinct of self -preservation, carried out without proper preparation and in a hurry, the competitions would allow to objectively choose the best.

These and other considerations led to the wave of strict criticism of the project of methodological recommendations from the scientific community. The culmination of protest actions was the third session of the conference of scientists, held on May 29, 2015, in which more than a thousand researchers took part in the work. The reports devoted to the analysis of the methodological recommendations were made by both critics and supporters of the document - representatives of the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Science and the Council on Science under the Ministry of Education and Science.

Although in informal conversations, officials evaluated protest activity as a collective hysteria, the causes of which need research, they could not ignore such an active opposition. Changes were made to the draft methodological recommendations, and representatives of a number of public organizations - the trade union of workers of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Society of Scientists, the Commission for Monitoring the Reform of Science - were invited to discuss and reform the document.

In the midst of the vacation season-in July-August-there was an active and tough discussion of methodological recommendations in which representatives of the aforementioned public organizations and the Council for Science under the Ministry of Education and Science took part. As a result, a compromise acceptable for the scientific public began to emerge: the document made to the draft, as well as the prepared changes should guarantee that it can be realized without a sharp reduction in the number of researchers. But the devil, as you know, in details, up to the arrangement of commas, and it is precisely to these details that the article of the active participant in summer discussions, co -chair of the Council of Scientists Pavel Chebotarev, is devoted to these details.

Evgeny Onishchenko