CERN and Russia break up

 At this week's meeting, the CERN Council did what many people expected: effectively ejected Russia and Belarus.  This was done somewhat more softly than had been expected, since, rather than acting immediately, the Council would not extend their cooperation agreements when they expire in 2024.   This was a compromise, since many people had been pushing for faster action.   2024 is far off.   The statement was accompanied by the expected text denouncing the Russian invasion, but it still seems like an attempt to put off any real action.   

It will also not solve the authorship problems faced by the large LHC Collaborations (and likely by smaller groups), where some European funding agencies (most notably the Germans and the Poles - see my previous posts) have told their grantees to stop collaboration with Russian institutions.   And, of course Ukrainian scientists are generally doing this of their own volition.  There may have been some quiet agreement with the European funding agencies, but this will still feel like a slap in the face to the Ukrainian scientists who work at CERN.   As I noted in a previous post, I have enormous sympathy for my Russian colleagues, many of whom expressed their opposition to the war when they could legally do so.  But still, if it comes down to a decision between accommodating scientists from the invaded country or those from the invaders country, my sympathy is clearly with the invaded country.  

On the other hand, scientific ethics require giving appropriate scientific credit to the people who did the work. In large collaborations, this is rule-based - when you join an experiment you have to contribute a certain amount of service work (work to keep the experiment running), take data-collection shifts, etc., and, after a certain amount of time, you are added to the author list for all papers, along with 900-3,000 of your closest colleagues.   For example, the ALICE experiment (at the LHC) experiment rules are available here.  Usually, 6 months or a year after you leave the collaboration, you are removed from the author list.   Neither the general principles of scientific ethics nor these collaboration-based rules contain exceptions for cases when the workers employers behave unacceptably. 

Authorship questions are likely to come up again as the CERN Council decision rattles down to the four LHC experiments, who will need to decide how to handle their author lists.   This will also likely result in a compromise of some sort.  One possibility which I like would be to list the scientists from Russian institutions on the author list, but not list their institutional affiliations.