Monday, March 21, 2022

Science in the age of Ukraine: update

 One additional item regarding Russian involvement in world science:  According to a tweet by Robyn Dixon,  the Moscow Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, Russia has now barred university staff from publishing in international (presumably non-Russian) scientific journals or attending international conferences. 

If this is enforced, this will essentially bar all collaborative publications, since I can't imagine non-Russians being willing to publish in Russian journals.  All of the LHC experiments (and many many other international collaborations) have a long pipeline of papers at various stages in the analyzing/writing/editing/publication process.  What will happen to these papers?    

There may be a precedent from the height of the cold war, when the West and the Soviet Union had parallel journal structures, and cross-publishing was uncommon.   A. B. Migda published his' 1956 quantum mechanical calculation of Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal suppression of bremsstrahlung and pair production  in both the American Physical Review and the Soviet Doklady Akad Nauk SSR.  Now, the Physical Review article is well known and  still heavily cited, while the Doklady Akad Nauk SSR article is mostly forgotten.  

If all better solutions fall through, one could imagine a solution where the Russian part of a collaboration publishes a result in Russian journals, while the Western part publishes in a Western journal.   I am sure that many readers will be slightly outraged by this idea.  I do not claim that it is a good idea, but it may be the least-bad route forward if the Russian-Western estrangement drags on for longer than different collaboration can hold off on publications in the hope that the author list problem will resolve itself.



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