Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors

[NNadir]

A Nature news item:

Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors Holly Else, Nature News, Mar 14, 2022.

Subtitle:

Most publications are still considering manuscripts irrespective of nationality — but Russia plans to remove a requirement for scientists to publish in foreign titles.

It's probably open sourced, but an excerpt:

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many research organizations swiftly cut funding and collaboration ties with Russia. But the moves have sparked debate over whether Russian scientists should be able to publish in international journals. Some argue that a boycott is morally correct and could help end the war, but many journals say that indiscriminately isolating Russia’s scientists would do more harm than good. This week, Russian authorities seem to have responded to threats of a boycott by saying that it plans to drop a requirement that government-funded scientists publish in recognized foreign journals. That move that could further harm the country’s science, say some Russian researchers.

Ukrainian scientists have issued the strongest calls for banning Russian researchers from journals. “Russian scientists have no moral right to retransmit any messages to the world scientific community,” says Olesia Vashchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Young Scientists Council at the Ministry of Education and Science, in two letters dated 1 March. The letters, to publisher Elsevier and citation database Clarivate, call for Russian journals to be removed from databases and for Russian scientists to be taken off journal editorial boards.

Those opposed to a ban — in Russia and elsewhere — say that it would penalize scientists who oppose their government’s actions, and that science can act as a diplomatic channel. “You have to ask what this will achieve. Is it about sending a signal? If so, there are better ways,” says Richard Sever, co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv...

I'm not sure how to think about this. I frequently find myself reading papers translated from Russian; Russian science can be and often is very good.

As for diplomacy, I have scanned an account of the first meeting of international nuclear scientists exchanging talks on their approaches to fast nuclear reactors. There is in it, some science - I scanned it because of my personal interest in an American presentation, but I was definitely intrigued by the Russian papers. The Russians built the most successful sodium cooled fast reactor ever built, and they were pioneers in LBE (lead-bismuth eutectic) coolants.

To my mind, it may go a little too far to ban knowledge, but of course that's my opinion.

One can also discern something about an enemy by what they do and do not write. I recall reading a joke somewhere that the world's nuclear weapons community all understood how their putative opponents made nuclear weapons by seeing that everybody published the phase diagrams of every alloy of plutonium except that of gallium. (Gallium stabilizes the δ phase of plutonium, a necessary practice to manufacture an implosion type nuclear weapon - it startles me that American scientists and their immigrant friends in the early 1940's were able to discover that with an element for which macroscopic samples existed for only a short time.)

This is not to say that scientists are all good people. Years back, while wandering around the stacks at Princeton's Firestone Library, I came across a book written, German, by Johannes Stark, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering what today is still known as "The Stark Effect," that was called "Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft," Nazism and Science.

I muddled through sections of it with my poor understanding of German; it was about so called "German Physics" as opposed to "Jewish Physics" that of Einstein among others, and I recall translating a part where Stark mocked the notion that "Science is international." He called for "German Physics," a physics that denied reality, to be the only physics that Germans should use.

Stark was an enthusiastic Nazi; the worst sort. He was sentenced to prison after the war.

We have not however, stopped recognizing that the Stark Effect is very real; it's good, not just good but essential, science.

Of course, we all hate what Russia has done and is doing, but the challenges we face as a planet - especially in the case of climate change - suggest that we need to consider whether our expressions of contempt for their government's policies of extreme violence should necessarily go this far. I'm not sure I know the ethical answer, but it's something about which we need to wrestle.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. I'm strongly opposed to this. It really serves no purpose.

Publications from scientists are meant to benefit, literally, anyone in the world, wherever applicable. Nor do I believe that publishing all Russian scientists because some of them may support the war is justifiable. This isn't going to hurt Russia economically, but it will stunt the careers of some of its scientists, with the pain being purely on a personal level for guilty and innocent alike.

Granted, if such a boycott went on for decades, it might lead to a brain drain as people learned publication requires emigration. But even during the Cold War, we benefited from publication of Russian science. NATO publishes some excellent conference proceedings which include many contributors from outside NATO -- even some from the old USSR, before its end.

There need to be some areas of human endeavor which aspire to be as free from nationalist influences as possible. Science should certainly be one of them.

[Tree-Hugger]

3. +1 nt

[Ron Obvious]

4. I agree completely. Thanks

This serves no purpose other than joining a witch hunt. Science is science. Or ought to be.

[NNadir]

6. I also agree.

I have personally profited intellectually from reading Russian science.

I have in my personal library, a series of books published on the analytical chemistry of 28 elements (in 10 volumes) that I picked up in various used book stores in the 1980s. The series - I don't have a full set, the series apparently had 17 volumes, but I could only come across 10 - was translated from Russian by Isrealis in the 1960's.

The series includes books to which I still refer. One of my favorite passages was a side note deploring the disposal of technetium. That volume is the only books in my library that refer to the chemistry of astatine, francium and promethium explicitly.

The series is now 50 years old - the work probably 60 or more - but I still refer to it here and there.

Russia is now a pariah state economically and culturally, but knowledge should never be a pawn in politics (although it often is here in recent times).

I read Glenn Seaborg's accounts of his part in the negotiations for the 1963 nuclear test ban treaties. He was able to accomplish what he did because of great Russian respect for his science, and he, in turn, returned that respect to his Russian colleagues.

Good science brings respect, and respect is a key element in the path to peace.

[xocetaceans]

5. I wouldn't ban scientists from publishing science. Nature is not inherently political.

Stark's contribution to physics was made much earlier than the 1919 Nobel Prize that recognized his contribution.

Also, the excerpt of his book (pages 7-14) that is online (https://germanhistory-intersections.org/de/wissen-und-bildung/ghis:document-18) seems much worse at a glance than a quick summary can possibly illustrate.

Stark seems to want to characterize a person's science by some sort of racist concept of mental capability: he keeps referring to "Geist" ( German for "mind"/"spirit" ) and (at one point) complains about the "repression" of the "German Mind", the resulting increase in the amount of published research and the subsequent "degradation" of the quality of research. (For that, consult the second to last paragraph of the excerpted text that is linked above.)

The reason I read "Geist" as "mind" and not as the marginally less damning word, "spirit", is this sentence in the excerpt:

"Wissenschaft ist die Erkenntnis des gesetzmäßigen Zusammenhanges von Tatsachen; die Aufgabe der Naturwissenschaft insonderheit ist die Erforschung der Körper und Vorgänge außerhalb des menschlichen Geistes durch Beobachtung und, soweit möglich, durch Anstellung von planmäßigen Versuchen."

Philosophically, the question of mind/body has always been present. "Spirit" is something else, I believe. I am not an expert in philosophy and the history of the mind/body problem. If there are good reasons to interpret "Geist" as "spirit" and not "mind" above, please let me know.



What follows is why Stark's name is remembered: otherwise, he would be better to be forgotten.

Award ceremony speech

Presentation Speech by Dr. Å.G. Ekstrand, President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on June 1, 1920

...
"In their course along the beam these canal-ray particles are continually colliding with the gas molecules which are contained in the tube, and thus it may be expected that light is emitted, if the kinetic energy is sufficiently great. As long ago as 1902 Stark predicted that the moving canal-ray particles thus become luminous, and that consequently the lines in the spectrum emitted by them must be displaced to the violet end of the spectrum if the rays are sighted approaching the observer. This takes place in the same way as the displacement of the lines in the spectra of those stars which are moving towards us, and as this displacement, the so-called Doppler effect, increases with the velocity of the light source, it must thus also be possible to determine the velocity of the canal-ray particles.

In 1905 Stark succeeded for the first time in detecting this phenomenon in a canal-ray tube containing hydrogen.

Beside each of the single hydrogen lines belonging to the familiar, so called Balmer series, a new, broader line appeared, which lay beside the original line, on the violet side of the spectrum if the canal rays were observed approaching the observer, but on the red side of the spectrum if observed from behind. The effect mentioned here has been established for the canal rays of all chemical elements which, in addition to hydrogen, have been investigated in this respect.

This discovery, by which a Doppler effect was recorded for the first time in the case of a terrestrial light source, was instrumental in the proof that canal-ray particles are luminous atoms, or atomic ions. The further study of the Doppler effect in their spectra, which has been pursued principally by Stark and his pupils, has led to extremely important results, not only concerning the canal rays themselves, their formation, etc., but also concerning the nature of the different spectra which one and the same chemical element can emit in different circumstances."
...

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1919/ceremony-speech/

Instead, remembering people like Hausdorff who died because of the Nazis would be better.

Felix Hausdorff:

Hausdorff ranks among the preeminent German mathematicians of the early 20th century.

He was born on 8 November 1868 in Breslau as the son of a Jewish merchant. From 1870 the family lived in Leipzig, where Hausdorff completed his schooling and the major part of his studies. In 1895 he was awarded his habilitation at the University of Leipzig where he taught, first as a lecturer and then from 1901-1910 as an unofficial associate professor. He was appointed associate professor in Bonn in 1910 and assumed a full professorship in 1913 in Greifswald. He returned to Bonn in 1921 to continue his work until 1935. During the national socialist regime, he suffered increasing harassment and humiliation until 26 Januar 1942, when he and his wife chose suicide over imminent deportation to a concentration camp.

Mathematical work

With his masterpiece Grundzüge der Mengenlehre (1914), Hausdorff established topology as an independent discipline in mathematics. This book was also a milestone on the way to modern set theory based mathematics of the 20th century.
In addition, Hausdorff made significant contributions to general and descriptive set theory (Hausdorff recursion formula for the aleph exponentiation, higher theory of ordered sets, beginning of the theory on saturated structures, solution to the continuum hypothesis for Borel sets), measure theory (Hausdorff mass and Hausdorff dimension, sphere paradox), algebra (Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula), functional anaylsis (Hausdorff limit theorems and problems of moments, Hausdorff-Young inequality), probability theory (semi-invariants, Gram-Charlier series, first correct proof of the strong law of large numbers), and insurance mathematics (first correct proof of the Hattendorff theorem, individual risk theory)."

...

https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/about-hcm/felix-hausdorff/about-felix-hausdorff/

[NNadir]

7. Thank you very much for that bit of enlightenment. I was totally unaware...

...of Hausdorff and that particular tragedy.

[xocetaceans]

8. You're welcome. n/t