Control over the academy's institutions will be handed over to a new state agency, which will approve directors of the academy’s scholarly institutions on the nomination from their staff. This new agency will be answerable directly to the prime minister’s Cabinet.
MOSCOW, September 18 (RIA Novosti) – A bill to hand over control of research institutions in Russia from the country’s Academy of Sciences to the federal government was approved on Wednesday in the federal parliament despite vehement objections from the scientific community.
The landmark bill, which has yet to be approved by the upper house of parliament and signed by the president, was hurriedly passed by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on Wednesday in the second and third readings while hundreds of scientists were rallying outside the legislature’s building.
Despite decades of decline since the end of the Soviet Union, the Academy of Sciences is still the country’s leading scientific research establishment comprising about 50,000 researchers across its 434 scholarly institutions.
According to the bill, control over the academy’s institutions would be handed over to a new state agency, except for those institutions subordinate to the academy’s three regional branches: Siberian, Far Eastern and Urals.
The draft law bars the state from interfering in the academy’s scientific work, but its main provision says that the three major Russian academies should be merged into one with a single managing body, and also that the right to manage the academic property is to be transferred to the special state agency.
At least two activists protesting against the reforms were detained outside the Duma on Wednesday. Police reported that some 200 people took part in the protest against the changes.
“This is destructive. State officials … can’t really control science because they poorly understand it,” academy member Vsevolod Bagno told RIA Novosti in comments about Wednesday’s vote.
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