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Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors
A Nature news item:
Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors Holly Else, Nature News, Mar 14, 2022.
Subtitle:
Most publications are still considering manuscripts irrespective of nationality — but Russia plans to remove a requirement for scientists to publish in foreign titles.
It's probably open sourced, but an excerpt:
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many research organizations swiftly cut funding and collaboration ties with Russia. But the moves have sparked debate over whether Russian scientists should be able to publish in international journals. Some argue that a boycott is morally correct and could help end the war, but many journals say that indiscriminately isolating Russia’s scientists would do more harm than good. This week, Russian authorities seem to have responded to threats of a boycott by saying that it plans to drop a requirement that government-funded scientists publish in recognized foreign journals. That move that could further harm the country’s science, say some Russian researchers.
Ukrainian scientists have issued the strongest calls for banning Russian researchers from journals. “Russian scientists have no moral right to retransmit any messages to the world scientific community,” says Olesia Vashchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Young Scientists Council at the Ministry of Education and Science, in two letters dated 1 March. The letters, to publisher Elsevier and citation database Clarivate, call for Russian journals to be removed from databases and for Russian scientists to be taken off journal editorial boards.
Those opposed to a ban — in Russia and elsewhere — say that it would penalize scientists who oppose their government’s actions, and that science can act as a diplomatic channel. “You have to ask what this will achieve. Is it about sending a signal? If so, there are better ways,” says Richard Sever, co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv...
Ukrainian scientists have issued the strongest calls for banning Russian researchers from journals. “Russian scientists have no moral right to retransmit any messages to the world scientific community,” says Olesia Vashchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Young Scientists Council at the Ministry of Education and Science, in two letters dated 1 March. The letters, to publisher Elsevier and citation database Clarivate, call for Russian journals to be removed from databases and for Russian scientists to be taken off journal editorial boards.
Those opposed to a ban — in Russia and elsewhere — say that it would penalize scientists who oppose their government’s actions, and that science can act as a diplomatic channel. “You have to ask what this will achieve. Is it about sending a signal? If so, there are better ways,” says Richard Sever, co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv...
I'm not sure how to think about this. I frequently find myself reading papers translated from Russian; Russian science can be and often is very good.
As for diplomacy, I have scanned an account of the first meeting of international nuclear scientists exchanging talks on their approaches to fast nuclear reactors. There is in it, some science - I scanned it because of my personal interest in an American presentation, but I was definitely intrigued by the Russian papers. The Russians built the most successful sodium cooled fast reactor ever built, and they were pioneers in LBE (lead-bismuth eutectic) coolants.
To my mind, it may go a little too far to ban knowledge, but of course that's my opinion.
One can also discern something about an enemy by what they do and do not write. I recall reading a joke somewhere that the world's nuclear weapons community all understood how their putative opponents made nuclear weapons by seeing that everybody published the phase diagrams of every alloy of plutonium except that of gallium. (Gallium stabilizes the δ phase of plutonium, a necessary practice to manufacture an implosion type nuclear weapon - it startles me that American scientists and their immigrant friends in the early 1940's were able to discover that with an element for which macroscopic samples existed for only a short time.)
This is not to say that scientists are all good people. Years back, while wandering around the stacks at Princeton's Firestone Library, I came across a book written, German, by Johannes Stark, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering what today is still known as "The Stark Effect," that was called "Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft," Nazism and Science.
I muddled through sections of it with my poor understanding of German; it was about so called "German Physics" as opposed to "Jewish Physics" that of Einstein among others, and I recall translating a part where Stark mocked the notion that "Science is international." He called for "German Physics," a physics that denied reality, to be the only physics that Germans should use.
Stark was an enthusiastic Nazi; the worst sort. He was sentenced to prison after the war.
We have not however, stopped recognizing that the Stark Effect is very real; it's good, not just good but essential, science.
Of course, we all hate what Russia has done and is doing, but the challenges we face as a planet - especially in the case of climate change - suggest that we need to consider whether our expressions of contempt for their government's policies of extreme violence should necessarily go this far. I'm not sure I know the ethical answer, but it's something about which we need to wrestle.
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