As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, communities from across the globe are continuing to mount pressure on President Vladimir Putin in the form of sanctions.
The scientific community too has taken similar steps, with institutions like CERN announcing that it will not be conducting research or projects with Russian scientists until further notice.
Now the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education has seemingly fired back, although at the cost of its own scientists, confirming that they will not be allowed to participate in international conferences and limiting their ability to be published in international science journals.
Regarding the latter, the publication in two indexed journals, the Web of Science and Scopus, have been banned. That said, publication in other recognised journals has been permitted.
The decision was shared via the Ministry’s official Telegram channel, along with a number of other changes for the year ahead, as well as some “advice” from the Russian government on where its scientists should be directed their efforts in the coming months.
“Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Valery Falkov, during a meeting with rectors of universities, announced that the Russian Government agreed with the proposal of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science to suspend this year the indexing of publications of Russian scientists in international databases and participation in foreign scientific conferences,” explained an announcement via Google Translate.
“We do not call for abandoning publications in Web of Science and Scopus. Russia must remain on the frontier of world science. But we need to proceed from our national interests,” added Valery Falkov following the aforementioned statement.
As The Verge rightfully points out, this decision undoes more than a decade of hard work by the Russian scientific community to create stronger ties with its international colleagues.
It therefore remains to be seen what impact this decision will have, but hopefully it will come to an end if the conflict does too. If not, it is unclear what will happen when scientists are forced to work in vacuum, ostensibly cut off from their peers.
[Image – Photo by Julia Koblitz on Unsplash]
