From the life of academic ecosystems

The system of institutions and organizations of the Russian Academy of Sciences can be imagined in the form of a complex structure with many horizontal and vertical internal and external connections that experience the impact of external stimuli. It would be nice to learn how to predict the dynamics, scale and consequences of certain solutions in order to more effectively develop behavioral and structural adaptations to the events.

The metaphor of the Darwin theory, being attached to the wounds as an object of research, allows you to see in the academic community such analogues of problems studied by ecologists, as an extinction of rare species, narrowing their range and numbers, a decrease in the diversity of population, the consequences of foreign invasions, etc.

The world of Darwin is a world of subjects that are fundamentally not reduced to objects like Newtonian celestial bodies. The subject differs from the object freedom of will, individual and historical experience, personal and group interests, as well as whimsical relationships with other subjects.

One of the central doctrines of the theory of natural selection is the doctrine of utilitarianism: every detail of the structure and any function are selected and fixed by natural selection only if they are useful to their owner. Darwin emphasized that this usefulness is immanent (has a purely internal nature), it is not imposed on anyone's craving for beauty (Darwin does not write about justice), or by anyone's desire for diversity.

If someone wants to manipulate the evolution of the group of individuals, to impose external usefulness to it, then he must first falsify their personal and group history, destroy personal and group ties, eliminate the concept of goal and translate to a purely reactive model of behavior, devoid of memory, accumulated experience and regular comparison with internal strategies.

The most obvious mechanism of external manipulation of the Academy of Sciences is the regulation of resource, primarily financial, flows. The value and procedure for the distribution of financial resources can cause changes in the structure, composition and numbers of certain groups of science workers or, on the contrary, contribute to their stabilizing selection.

If the principles of financing are formed on the basis of Darwin theory, then they must be measured with the forecast of consequences. To what changes in behavior, motives and structure of the relationship of science workers will one or another proposed measures lead? How does the tactics correlate with the strategy?

Financing and incentives

Let us take as an example the recent financial injections intended for payments of stimulating allowances to scientists for publications in high -rated scientific journals.

On the one hand, this can only be welcomed.

1. Finally, scientists begin to pay directly for their successes in fundamental science, and this is true.
2. These are at least some real actions for the targeted suspension of emigration of precisely those specialists who are most in demand and easiest could adapt to work in other countries.
3. This should contribute to the integration of Russian science into world and coercion to overcome provinciality.
4. This will enhance horizontal and weaken vertical ties within the academy. (The usefulness of the latter for the Russian Academy of Sciences, however, is not as obvious as the first three points. Since the transformation of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR into Russian Academy of Sciences, vertical ties in Russian science - naturally, without taking into account the Kurchatov Institute, has noticeably weakened, which is traditionally a hierarchical structure of the Russian Academy of Sciences inappropriate to those network requirements that are presented to it as final indicators.)

And then the happy authors of prestigious publications did not have time to start receiving the promised gingerbread, how serious questions appeared. Simple mental experiments allow you to identify serious inconsistencies. What is perceived as the long -awaited justice by one community members meets outraged rebuff from others.

The regional injustice is obvious and the injustice is official. Why will scientists of different regions receive different allowances for publications of the same level? Fair? No. Why did part of the bona fide working employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences are actually discriminated? A scream is that in the wounds an acute shortage of engineers and programmers to work with expensive equipment, to create new scientific devices and programs, for complex experiments. However, the proposed stimulating allowances obviously lower even below the plinth of both relative payment and the social status of engineers and programmers.

Does the proposed principle of stimulating scientists have a chance to withstand the test of time and remain stable for at least 3-5 years? It is unlikely. Attempts to correct both of the above injustices have already begun. In particular, here is a quote from an interview with the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences: “ When answering the question of how to change the regional and official disproportion in assessing the labor of scientists, Alexander Sergeyev proposed to introduce into the wording of the current or new decree“ Researchers, heads of scientific structures, divisions and highly qualified engineering and technical personnel ”.” Thus, stimulation should cover a wider group of RAS workers, for which purely scientific criteria no longer work. However, they also work poorly for the original group of “researchers”. With the real distribution of money, the problem immediately pops up, originally perceived as purely technical, the problem of normalizing. All publications, obviously, are different-according to the impact factor, by the number of co-authors, in the field of science. It is required to bring to a common denominator - multiplication or division of the number of articles into appropriate coefficients. Obviously, there are areas where a scientist may well publish 10-20 articles a year, and the region where even actively working leaders publish one article in 2-3 years. This should also be taken into account. It often happens that one scientist has already received financial support in the form of a grant, and the other did not receive money for a similar study. Both money for stimulating allowances and grants of the RFFIF, RNF or CCP, in its essence, budget money allocated for science. Should this money be taken into account if in all cases only publications become the main criterion for productivity? And far from an idle question: what falls into the assessment - products for a year, for three years, in five years? Should this time be the same for the article and monograph? Attempts to achieve some ultimate objective “justice” through normalizations are obviously hopeless.

Borschevik Sosnovsky

Trying to predict the motives and behavior of those who, due to financing, have an external impact on academic workers, we may well proceed from the fact that they are initially not characteristic of evil, they also want justice in their own way, sincerely strive to increase the “effectiveness” of Russian science as an object of “cultivation” entrusted to them.

Faced with a cry of “deprived”, including those scientists who believe that the assessment exclusively on WOS publications is inadequate, the compilers of the rules will be forced to rush from one extreme to another. From assessments according to one criterion - the number of publications of WOS - the science managers will return to a well -known way of summing up the results of social media for a long list of indicators and the corresponding coefficients, which ultimately need to be changed and folded. A lot will be added - the implementation of tasks and examinations at the request of directive bodies, and the training of students and graduate students, and to defend Russian interests, and the popularization of science ... This will nullify those three positive consequences of the introduction of stimulating allowances, which were mentioned at the beginning.

But there is another reason that will force officials to curtail the principle of stimulating researchers based on scientific indicators. These are mutations caused by such influences. In living nature, as soon as some external indicator, for example, the size of the goiter or color and size of the tail, become a significant factor in selection, we get the widest range of various freaks and specializations. The same should be expected in the scientific community.

What does this lead to the end? Here is one example.

In the middle of the 20th century, Soviet scientists demanded to grow a feed culture that gives the maximum amount of silage per hectare of land. And so that it is resistant to drought, and to frost, and to diseases, and pests, and to competition from other species. Scientists managed. They found a suitable wild plant in the Caucasus and adapted to large -scale cultivation in moderate climatic zones. The plant was called Heraacléum Sosnówskyi (Sosnovsky hogweed). Now this is the horror of all abandoned fields and a buuse, pursuing the real threat to life of the people encountered with him (at least children).

As soon as the perspective of the “borshchevik” at the academy will become obvious, you will have to slow down the race of quantitative indicators.

Its own story

But what to do if you want to steer, but how to steer is not clear? Where is the basis that can contribute to the heyday of Russian science, and not only it? What can those who consider the science of an aggressive and harmful pseudoscience, the assessments of which do not correspond to the real history of science, who believe that there are no convincing correlations of the real contribution to science and the number of publications even taking into account their rating? Maybe just provide a “biocenosis” with the opportunity to develop according to natural immanent rules? Or is "cultivation" inevitable?

Obviously, the discussion should not be limited only to “banal” salaries and bonuses. No less acutely cost property problems, primarily on scientific tools, the opportunity to invest in expanding the material base and maintain the rights to this contribution. Even such a “trifle” as the cancellation of the combustion of budget money when crossing the New Year with any guarantees of their assignment of their scientific team can completely change the tactics of expenditure of funds, taking into account strategic goals.

Evolutionary problems always consist in the fact that they follow those who determine utilitarianism. And here the question arises: to what extent we, who are inside the scientific community, do we ourselves want its immanent evolution? Do we want to consider our institute or the Academy as a whole separately evolving subject? Or do we believe that the principles of selection within the academic community can be transferred to external groups?

If we are ready to transfer the evolution of the scientific community to the “feeding hand”, then why not agree to select the criterion of large udder and high egg production? If we want our community to have its own subjectivity and its own evolutionary history, then it would be nice to resist the reduction of this subject into objects.

Among the many definitions of the concept of “species” are one of the most popular: “The species is that its constituent individuals consider it a look.” If we cease to consider ourselves part of the Russian academic community as a separate type, then on the evolutionary prospects of the Russian Academy of Sciences you can put a cross.

Vladimir Olshansky,
doct. physical. sciences, Art. scientific. sore. Institute of Ecology Problems
and the evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, member of the organizing committee of the first conference of scientific
employees of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1991)