23. 3. 2010: Extraordinary Academic Forum on the new Methodology for assessing researchers

An extraordinary Academic Forum was organised on Tuesday 23 March 2010 by the Czech Mathematicians and Physicians Union. The topic of debate was the new Methodology for Assessing Results of Research Organisations approved by the Council for Research, Development and Innovation (CRDI) and passed to the consultation procedure. Martin Černohorský opened the discussion, to be followed by Jiří Zlatuška and Jana Musilová from Masaryk University, and Jiří Rákosník from the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. All the speakers agreed on the obvious lack of expertise in the new methodology, the major novelty of which is the fixed ratio of institutional spending on basic and applied research at 85:15. Moreover, the methodology introduces its own definition of these two types of research where applied research is understood primarily as development and innovations. Furthermore, ratios between individual scientific disciplines have also been fixed although it is not clear what the procedure was for setting these given coefficients. All the speakers also agreed that the new Methodology has failed to eliminate the problems of the current methodology and added new ones. Civic society Forum Science Is Alive! is very greatly concerned that the new Methodology was drafted again without any debate with expert public. We consider the inter-departmental consultancy, which is very short and the impact of which has been largely marginal in the past years (comments have not been taken into account), to be completely insufficient.