The Russian Academy of Sciences will reorganize the commissions to combat pseudoscience and falsification of research and transfer their functions to an expert council, Vedomosti writes . According to the publication, the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences made such a decision at the end of 2022.
The head of the expert council of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Stepan Kalmykov, noted that the commissions are not being liquidated, but "restructured."
Nevertheless, Vasily Vlasov, a professor at the Department of Health Management and Economics at the Higher School of Economics and a member of the commission for combating pseudoscience, considers the decision to reorganize the “abolition of commissions”:
“The commissions were created by people who were interested in the development of domestic science at the level of world standards. They tried to influence events within the academy, analyzed the work of candidates in the elections, and so on, but there was always opposition. Transferring to an expert council is more like an abolition than a continuation of activity.”
A Vedomosti interlocutor close to the Russian Academy of Sciences noted that “the commissions have always irritated both the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and those scientists whose work has been criticized,” however, according to him, the dissolution of the current composition of the commissions was not discussed.
The Commission to Combat Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research was established in 1998. In 2018, the commission was divided into two parts.
In 2019, the commission prepared a report on the pseudoscientific publications of six candidates for corresponding members and academicians. Later, two of the six candidates were excluded from the race, however, among the winners of the vote were two scientists with signs of "pseudo-science" in their publications.