AltSU experts told "Kommersant" about the scientific and international activities of the university in the context of sanctions

10 June 2022 Editorial Office
Roman Raikin, Vice-Rector for International Affairs Development of Altai State University, and Svetlana Lobova, Deputy Director of the Project Management Office of AltSU, told “Kommersant” about the international activities and publication activity of the university in the context of sanctions.

The business publication gives a positive forecast for the share of foreign students in Russian universities. According to the authors of the article, there is no reason to believe that the number of foreign youth in Russian universities will drop sharply. It is due to the fact that the vast majority of those who come to study in Russia are citizens from friendly countries. According to RAEX calculations, this is over 96% of the total foreign contingent of full-time education. Students from Ukraine account for less than 3%, and only 1% of all foreigners are students from North America, Europe, South Korea, etc. According to the Ministry of Education and Science, the total number of foreign students going into higher education in Russia in 2021 amounted to 324 thousand people.

Altai State University is mainly attended by students from Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

“The majority of applicants from these countries, with whom we are constantly in contact, do not intend to change their decision about studying in Russia, in particular, at our university,” says Roman Raikin, Vice-Rector for International Affairs Development of Altai State University.

In the context of sanctions, the priorities of scientific research by domestic scientists cannot remain unchanged: attention is now increasingly riveted to the issues of import substitution, and the research itself should largely be focused on applying the results in practice. At the same time, Russian science is placed in difficult conditions - in particular, there are already difficulties with access to information about the latest research by leading foreign scientists. Due to limited academic exchange and sanctions on technology imports, access to publications is an important means of advancing science. However, the situation is not as dire as it might seem.

“Web of Science for the vast majority of Russian researchers still acts as an aggregator of information about publications and their citations in a certain number of journals indexed on this platform. Therefore, the departure of Web of Science from Russia deprived scientists not so much of access to publications as information about the scientometric indicators of a particular journal, a particular publication, a specific author or organization. This limits the adoption of some decisions based on scientometric indicators,” says Svetlana Lobova, Deputy Director of the Project Management Office of Altai State University. “Those colleagues who did not consider this database only as a source of information about the Hirsch level and the number of publications, I believe, will be able to reorient themselves aggregators of data on the results of current scientific research in the world.

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