Prove that you are worthy to work for free

An important element of the work of the scientific community is a qualitative examination. It is necessary at many different levels. Quite often, experts work for free (as they say, “on a voluntary basis”), because in fact without good independent reviews, assessments, reviews, science will lose the key mechanism of self -control.

The most famous example of such work is the review of scientific publications. The editors of the magazine refers to a good specialist who does not have a conflict of interests with a request to give a recall of the article. Most often, such work takes a lot of time, especially if the review is negative. Magazines value their reviewers, realizing that they spend their time and effort to support the level of the magazine. In addition, reviewing is carried out anonymously, so there are not even indirect bonuses here.

Now imagine that the editorial office sends a letter to the well -known scientist the following content. “ For several years now you have been a reviewer in our magazine. Over the past time, you wrote several dozen detailed reviews that helped our magazine better. If you want to continue to continue this work, then you need to fill out an Excel file of five sheets before the specified date, making all your publications in the last five years, all monographs, all reports at conferences, all preprints. In addition, note that publications must be divided into two categories: articles in the reviewed magazines and articles included in international databases. If you do not do this, then you will lose the opportunity to continue to write detailed reviews for us for free! »Assessed? I didn't succeed either. But our favorite ministry behaves just that.

Being a member of the Vakovsky Expert Council in Physics, I faced the need to fill out a huge form, although information about my publications is easily available in open bases-it is enough to simply ask for my Orcid identifier (or its analogue in Scopus or WOS ), and in some cases more complete information is available 2 . Of course, all members of the Soviets should do the same. Thus, the ministry wants to load its free highly qualified assistants with a completely useless work, although it has the opportunity to get data on their scientific activity directly, not burdening scientists with excessive bureaucracy.

Recently, one of the ministers - Maxim Oreshkin - quoted the words of the British "double agent" Kim Filby, who worked for Soviet intelligence since 1933 3 . We will do it too. “When my employee began to actively conduct work - to recruit agents, to identify residents, I flooded it with an useless paper routine, and his activity came to naught very quickly. I am proud that I personally developed and introduced several new forms of reports. ”

Sergey Popov,
Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences

1 If the ministry is interesting-here it is: Orcid.org/0000-0002-4292-8638

2 For employees of Moscow State University, it is collected in the Truth system, cm, for example, istina.msu.ru/accounts/profile/sergeplar/

3 newspaper Vedomosti, October 2019 .