Saturday, May 7, 2022

Reactions to Ukraine from the world of science

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now continued for more than two months, and no end is in sight.  Instead of ending the war on May 9th, Putin seems likely to expand it.   'Wait and see' is becoming increasingly untenable.  Two main paradigms drive scientific worlds responses to the invasion:

One paradigm, followed by most of the Western world, is that the Russian invasion is a brutal unprovoked attack that must be punished; we should not associate with the attackers.  Continuing scientific cooperation is 'business as usual,' tantamount to ignoring the invasion.

The second paradigm is that international science is an important way to maintain lines of communication and cooperation.  Maintaining scientific interchange is important for the scientists involved, and keeps the other side from being a nameless, faceless entity.   In the long term, this might influence governments to be less antagonistic toward each other.  

There are of course many slightly more nuanced approaches, mostly focused on punishing the relevant governments and government entities, while protecting the individual Russian and Belarusian scientists to the extent possible.

Both of these approaches have much merit, but they point in different directions.  Different scientists and scientific organizations have emphasized these two paradigms differently.   My personal view is that where they conflict, I will support the invadees over the invaders, and support the Ukrainian point of view, which is clearly that this is not a time for business as usual.  This approach has limits - scientific contact during the cold war clearly had significant benefits for all, but the invasion of Ukraine seems closer to Hitler in 1938 than the cold war.

Germany's Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) has condemned the invasion, and suspended all cooperation with Russian institutions, even at a cost of a several year delay in their new accelerator.    The CALICE Collaboration (a coalition that is developing new methods of calorimetry for high-energy physics experiments) has issued a similar condemnation, suspending Russian institutions from the Institution Board, prohibiting CALICE presentation by scientists from Russian institutions, and also banning CALICE presentations at conferences in Russia.  

Other large projects have taken much less action.  For example, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) has not visibly reacted to the invasion.   Similarly, U. S. Dept. of Energy laboratories have not said anything, although some experiments involving both Russian and European collaborators have had intense discussions about the way forward. 

As noted below, CERN has taken a somewhat middle view, issuing a statement of solidarity with Ukraine, suspending much cooperation with Russia, and, although not expelling Russian scientists, stopping new collaboration with Russia.  Further action may be taken at the next CERN Council meeting in June, possibly including expelling Russia.    This would be a major shift for CERN, since it was founded to improve cooperation in Europe in the aftermath of World War II - exactly per the second thrust above.

None of these decisions deal explicitly with scientific authorship for work that is already complete, or largely complete.  Scientific ethics rules require giving authorship credit to the people who did the work.   These rules do not include exceptions for changing rules from funding agencies that require (in the case of Germany, Poland and Finland, at least) an immediate end to collaboration.  

For now,  the large CERN LHC collaborations are posting their papers on the Cornell arXiv, authored by 'the XXX Collaboration', without individual names.  This may buy time, but it is not a long-term solution, since author lists are required before the papers are published in scientific journals.   Some papers from smaller collaborations have come out listing Russian authors, but without their Russian institutional affiliation.   To me, this seems like the least bad solution to a very difficult solution - we properly recognize the work of our Russian colleagues, but avoid giving credit to the institutions that are on record as supporting the war.