Putin allowed Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University to independently award academic degrees

President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University to award academic degrees without the participation of the highest certification commission (VAK). This was reported on the Kremlin website.

Other scientific organizations and universities are also mentioned in the decree, "having achieved high results in scientific and scientific and technical activities."

“These organizations are vested with the rights to independently approve the provisions on the protection of dissertations for the degree of candidate of sciences, for the degree of Doctor of Sciences, to create such advice on their base <...> establish the procedure for awarding scientific degrees,” the document says.

According to him, Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University will receive the described rights from September 1, 2016, other universities, if they are included in the corresponding list, from September 1, 2017.

After this initiative was supported by the State Duma, the First Deputy Minister of Education and Science, Natalya Tretyak, said that in the future, the right to award scientific degrees will receive 30–40 leading universities.

Currently, the right to award scientific degree and deprive them of the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission at the Ministry of Education and Science. In April, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation developed a number of changes to the law on the award of scientific degrees. According to them, scientific work can be rejected if inaccurate information is found in it or if its text does not correspond to the text posted on the organization’s website in which the dissertation council operates.

Earlier, as a result of investigations of the participants in the Dissernet project, the former speaker of the Moscow City Duma Vladimir Platonov and State Duma deputy Rishat Abubakirov lost their doctoral degrees.

The Dissernet project, the purpose of which is the analysis of candidate and doctoral dissertations, mainly Russian politicians, began to work in 2013. For two years, his participants discovered borrowing in the works of the State Duma of Sergei Naryshkin , deputies of Tatyana Alekseeva and Nikolai Bulaev, ministers Vladimir Kolokoltsev and Vladimir Medinsky, Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov, Governor of St. Petersburg Georgy Poltavchenko and many other officials.