According to Pinigin, Trubnikov borrowed almost half of his dissertation from the candidate dissertations of physicists Andrei Butenko and Viktor Karpinsky. For each of them, Trubnikov was a scientific co-supervisor, both dissertations were defended on October 11, 2012. Trubnikov himself defended himself on November 14 of the same year. Andrei Butenko and Viktor Karpinsky told Gazeta.Ru that they had no claims against Trubnikov and rejected all Pinigin’s accusations. “I can only call the ‘games’ around Trubnikov’s dissertation very dirty and undignified,” Butenko said.
Pinigin’s statement was also received by members of the July 1 club, an informal community of academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the free network society Dissernet reported. In letters to members of the July 1 club, Pinigin signed himself as an activist of the Yakut branch of Dissernet. Dissernet claims that they do not have such an activist.
Pinigin explained to RBC that he collaborated with a Dissernet activist in Yakutia, whose name he did not name, and that is why he signed up. At the same time, he questions the scientific novelty of three of the six provisions of the deputy minister’s dissertation. “I discovered these gross violations in literally half a day of research, about a couple of days after the meeting of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission on the Medinsky case, where Trubnikov assured everyone that he had seen some elusive documents from Medinsky’s personal file,” Pinigin told RBC.
Total check
Dissernet has no comments on Trubnikov’s work. “An express analysis of Trubnikov’s dissertation showed how much it could have been clarified in the couple of hours that we had for it, that there was normal co-authorship, which was properly declared,” Andrei Zayakin, co-founder of Dissernet, told RBC.
A member of the July 1 club, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, physicist Vadim Brazhkin, told RBC that he had studied Pinigin’s claims and believed that they were groundless. “It's just a team effort. Trubnikov and his comrades worked together and prepared descriptions of their work together, and then they all used these descriptions in their works, but Trubnikov’s colleagues defended themselves a little earlier than he,” he noted.
Doctor of Historical Sciences Vasilyeva wants to be sure of the scientific integrity of all her subordinates, a department interlocutor told RBC. If plagiarism is discovered in the works of ministry leaders, who cannot be deprived of their degree due to the statute of limitations (the period within which one can challenge the receipt of an academic degree is ten years), they will be dismissed from the Ministry of Education and Science, he emphasized.
There are 24 officials of this level in the ministry. It is known that 13 of them have academic degrees. “This is the first time such a massive inspection will be carried out within the department,” former Deputy Minister of Education and Science, Rector of the Moscow City Pedagogical University Igor Remorenko told RBC.
Revenge of the “dissertation makers”
Pinigin’s letter aims to denigrate Trubnikov in the eyes of the minister, Andrei Zayakin believes. According to him, Trubnikov made key amendments to the draft regulations on the expert councils of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC) and to the draft changes to the regulations on the awarding of academic degrees, which put an end to the “dissertation business”, after which a statement appeared about the deprivation of the academic degree of the Trubnikov, and with the mention of Dissernet.
Zayakin notes that in a letter sent to the July 1 club, Pinigin indicates that Trubnikov supported the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, the scandal surrounding his doctoral dissertation on history from the end of 2016 to the end of 2017, but this is not so. “Trubnikov’s signature is not on any document submitted to the Higher Attestation Commission in the Medinsky case. The order from Vasilyeva herself - it seems that this was the only such order personally signed by the minister for the year. Usually Trubnikov signs them. So his behavior was exactly the opposite: he distanced himself from Medinsky as much as possible,” Zayakin points out.
Trubnikov confirmed to RBC that he was working on draft changes to the regulations on expert councils and the awarding of academic degrees. “We wanted to improve the reputation of the Higher Attestation Commission and dissertation councils of universities. So, I introduced an amendment according to which the dissertation council cannot consider the work for which it issued an academic degree if there are comments about it. We have also simplified the procedure for filing an application for deprivation of academic degrees. Now anyone, not just a specialized specialist, can challenge a degree due to plagiarism,” the deputy minister told RBC.
The message specifies:
“The Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research can introduce several new lines of grants to create laboratories in universities, stimulate the mobility of scientists, open new positions for scientists, and also provide scientific organizations with centralized access to the Web of Science and Scopus databases, said the Deputy Minister of Education and science Grigory Trubnikov at a meeting of the Professorial Forum at RUDN University.
According to G. Trubnikov, in order to stimulate mobility - supporting the participation of scientists in experiments outside their institutions - a new line of grants is being proposed (up to 40-50). “These are funds, for example, to pay for the resources of the installation on which the scientist conducts the experiment, and to support publication activities,” he explained.
According to the official, several new initiatives are being discussed with the leadership of the RFBR. These are joint projects of the Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, aimed at creating new positions for graduate students, postdocs, young scientists under 39 years of age, as well as about 200 positions for leading scientists and 100 for scientific leaders of schools, topics, and projects.
It is also planned to provide scientific organizations with centralized access to scientometric databases and full-text scientific resources. “According to the decision of Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, this year we want to move to a centralized subscription,” added Grigory Trubnikov. “Give all 1,700 organizations that work in the field of research and development access to the full line of Web of Science and Scopus indexes and, in agreement with the Russian Academy of Sciences and with the approval of the National Subscription Council, open access to several dozen full-text resources that are in demand by the scientific community.” The deputy minister also noted that the Ministry of Education and Science would like to “offer a competition for the creation of laboratories to participate in mega-science projects.”
In addition, according to G. Trubnikov, there is an intention to create a separate line of grants for universities to carry out research in accordance with the goals and objectives of the National Technology Platform.”
In a message about this forum on the official website of the Russian Academy of Sciences a number of other data are provided: “Student associations based on their interests will receive grants of up to 3 million rubles... At the forum it was discussed what the status of a professor should be - university or national, and how universities should interact with the production sector. The question arose about the need for the participation of the professorial community in the examination and analysis of regulations adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science. The plans include the creation of a Scientific Society of Authors to improve the quality of defense of candidate and doctoral dissertations, and the presentation of a new “Professor of the Year” award.
The initiator of the First Professorial Forum is the public organization Russian Professorial Assembly, which includes more than 3,000 professors from 300 universities, constituting the scientific and scientific-pedagogical elite of the country. Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Russian Professorial Assembly - Rector of RUDN University and Chairman of the Higher Attestation Commission Vladimir Filippov.”
Under the pretext of checking for plagiarism among officials of the Ministry of Education and Science, the Minister Olga Vasilyeva can deal with his deputy Grigory Trubnikov. At the same time, a fight is being waged against the deputy minister, who tried to reform the activities of the expert councils of the Higher Attestation Commission, on behalf of the community "Dissernet"- without the knowledge and consent of its participants. Yesterday agency "Ruspres" reported that the ministry headed by Olga Vasilyeva is actively eliminating competitors close to Arkady Rotenberg publishing house "Prosveshchenie", which now receives large government orders for the publication of educational literature. The Ministry of Education and Science agreed to send for re-examination a textbook on Russian history published by the Drofa publishing house, owned by the Eksmo-AST company. Before this, the Prosveshcheniye publishing house patented the sign of the federal state educational standard approved by the department as intellectual property and filed a major lawsuit for its use against another subsidiary of Eksmo-AST, the Ventana-Graf publishing house.
Relativist from the city of Khandygi
At a meeting on January 9, the minister instructed the director of the department of certification of scientific and scientific-pedagogical workers of the Ministry of Education and Science, Sergei Pakhomov, to check the dissertations of all heads of the department - deputy ministers and heads of departments, referring to a letter from a resident of the Yakut city of Khandygi, Viktor Pinigin, who demanded that the deputy minister responsible for the development of science be deprived of his doctoral degree , Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Grigory Trubnikov. Pinigin claims in his statement sent to the Ministry of Education and Science that Trubnikov’s doctoral dissertation “Synchrotron of relativistic heavy ions Nuclotron in the NICA accelerator complex” contains plagiarism.
Grigory Trubnikov
According to Pinigin, Trubnikov borrowed almost half of his dissertation from the candidate dissertations of physicists Andrei Butenko and Viktor Karpinsky. For each of them, Trubnikov was a scientific co-supervisor, both dissertations were defended on October 11, 2012. Trubnikov himself defended himself on November 14 of the same year. According to RBC, Andrei Butenko and Viktor Karpinsky told the publication that they had no claims against Trubnikov and rejected all Pinigin’s accusations. “I can only call the ‘games’ around Trubnikov’s dissertation very dirty and undignified,” Butenko said.
Pinigin’s statement was also received by members of the “1 July” club, an informal community of academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In letters to members of the July 1 club, Pinigin signed himself as an activist of the Yakut branch of Dissernet. Dissernet claims that they do not have such an activist.
Pinigin himself said that he collaborated with a Dissernet activist in Yakutia, whose name he did not name, and that is why he signed up like that. At the same time, he questions the scientific novelty of three of the six provisions of the deputy minister’s dissertation. “I discovered these gross violations in literally half a day of research, about a couple of days after the meeting of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission on the Medinsky case, where Trubnikov assured everyone that he had seen some elusive documents from Medinsky’s personal file,” Pinigin said. Judging by last year’s media publications, Trubnikov presented to members of the scientific-industrial session of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission for the Humanities and Social Sciences copies of the certification file, an audio recording of the dissertation council meeting and other documents “confirming compliance with the established procedures for awarding an academic degree to Medinsky,” so it is not entirely clear what documents Mr. Pinigin means.
Total check
Dissernet has no comments on Trubnikov’s work. “An express analysis of Trubnikov’s dissertation showed how much it could have been figured out in the couple of hours that we had for it, that there was normal co-authorship, which was properly declared,” said the co-founder of Dissernet. Andrey Zayakin .
A member of the July 1 club, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, physicist Vadim Brazhkin, said that he had studied Pinigin’s claims and believed that they were groundless. “It's just a team effort. Trubnikov and his comrades worked together and prepared descriptions of their work together, and then they all used these descriptions in their works, but Trubnikov’s colleagues defended themselves a little earlier than he,” he noted.
There are 24 officials at the relevant level in the ministry. It is known that 13 of them have academic degrees. “Such a mass inspection within the department will be carried out for the first time,” said former Deputy Minister of Education and Science, Rector of the Moscow City Pedagogical University Igor Remorenko.
Revenge of the “dissertation makers”
Pinigin’s letter aims to denigrate Trubnikov in the eyes of the minister, Andrei Zayakin believes. According to him, Trubnikov made key amendments to the draft regulations on expert councils Higher Attestation Commission(VAK) and to the draft amendments to the regulations on the awarding of academic degrees, which put an end to the “dissertation business”, after which a statement appeared about the deprivation of Trubnikov’s academic degree, and with the mention of “Dissernet”.
Zayakin notes that in a letter sent to the July 1 club, Pinigin indicates that Trubnikov supported the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, the scandal surrounding his doctoral dissertation on history lasted from the end of 2016 to the end of 2017, but this is not so. “Trubnikov’s signature is not on any document submitted to the Higher Attestation Commission in the Medinsky case. The order was signed by Vasilyeva herself - it seems that it was the only such order personally signed by the minister for the year. Usually Trubnikov signs them. So his behavior was exactly the opposite: he distanced himself from Medinsky as much as possible,” Zayakin points out.
Trubnikov confirmed that he was working on draft changes to the regulations on expert councils and the awarding of academic degrees. “We wanted to improve the reputation of the Higher Attestation Commission and dissertation councils of universities. So, I introduced an amendment according to which the dissertation council cannot consider the work for which it issued an academic degree if there are comments about it. We have also simplified the procedure for filing an application for deprivation of academic degrees. Now anyone, not just a specialized specialist, can challenge a degree due to plagiarism,” the deputy minister said.
As the agency previously reported "Ruspres", the head of the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission for History, Pavel Uvarov, decided to leave his post three days after the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission voted on Medinsky’s dissertation. Pavel Uvarov announced the need to deprive Medinsky of his academic degree on formal grounds. However, this issue was removed from discussion by the head of the Higher Attestation Commission Vladimir Filippov. On October 20, the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission decided not to deprive Minister Medinsky of his doctorate: 6 were in favor of deprivation, 4 were against, and 14 members of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission were in favor of retaining it. Before Filippov’s vote, several members were removed from the Supreme Attestation Commission, including commission secretary Nikolai Arister. Formally, the reason for the resignation was the involvement of these members of the Higher Attestation Commission in defending the dissertation of the rector of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute Andrei Nikolaenko.
Particles of plagiarism: Deputy Minister will be responsible for the accelerator
Gazeta.ru
Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Olga Vasilyeva and Deputy Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Grigory Trubnikov
Nikolay Galkin/TASS
The Minister of Education will check the dissertation of his deputy, Academician Trubnikov, for incorrect borrowings. A mysterious resident of Yakutia accused an official of cheating, who himself is actively fighting dissipation factories.
Minister of Education Olga Vasilyeva decided to toughly fight plagiarism in dissertations of the ministry's leadership. She stated this at a large weekly meeting of the department’s leadership. The reason Vasilyeva turned to this topic was the “signal” received at the ministry about possible plagiarism in the doctoral work of one of her most prominent and prominent deputies.
We are talking about academician Grigory Trubnikov, who oversees the scientific field.
A renowned physicist and specialist in the field of accelerator physics, he was appointed to this position almost a year ago, on January 25, 2017, and his appointment was widely supported in the scientific community.
Trubnikov defended his doctorate on the topic “Synchrotron of relativistic heavy ions Nuclotron in the NICA accelerator complex” on November 14, 2012 in the dissertation council D047.01.03 at the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna.
From 2014, before his appointment to the ministry, Trubnikov served as Vice-Director of JINR.
According to a certain applicant, signed Viktor Pinigin from Yakutia, the deputy minister’s work contains large-scale incorrect borrowings from two candidate’s papers defended at JINR just a month earlier - in October 2012. The authors of these works were Viktor Karpinsky (“Power supply and energy evacuation systems in fast-cycling superconducting synchrotrons”) and Andrei Butenko (Acceleration of heavy ion beams with a mass number of more than 100 in the superconducting synchrotron Nuclotron), for whom Trubnikov himself was a scientific supervisor.
Since 2009, Trubnikov has been the head of the Nuclotron-NICA project. NICA (Nuclotron based Ion Collider fAcility) is a new accelerator complex, which is being created on the basis of JINR with the aim of studying the properties of dense baryonic matter. This project was selected from 28 proposals for megascience projects implemented in Russia.
300 scientists from 70 institutions in 32 countries are involved in the preparation and implementation of the NICA project.
Gazeta.Ru got acquainted with the text of Trubnikov’s dissertation, at the end of which he expresses gratitude to Butenko and Karpinsky as direct participants and co-authors of joint works.
In three works there are indeed identical fragments of text, mainly of a technical nature, where there is a description of the experimental setup or the procedure of the experiment, as well as drawings.
On the left (text highlighted in yellow) is an excerpt from G. V. Trubnikov’s dissertation, on the right (text highlighted in green) - V. N. Karpinsky.
that in the text of Trubnikov’s dissertation, borrowings from the works of Butenko and Karpinsky amount to up to 43%,
and on this basis he should be deprived of his doctorate.
Trubnikov himself is confident in his work and only regrets the time it will now take for the investigation. “I am 300% confident in my work, I have no doubt that my contribution was decisive, I was the scientific supervisor of both colleagues,” the deputy minister told Gazeta.Ru. - These were the four happiest years of my life, when I sat in shifts, as they say, on a beam. And when a huge experiment was carried out and the result was obtained, naturally, we had many internal reports that we did not publish, and therefore their texts coincide textually in our works. By the way, I’ll tell those guys who are not indifferent to my person,
Common words
Butenko and Karpinsky themselves adhere to a similar position.
“I have only the most positive impressions from working with Grigory Vladimirovich. At that time, he was the head of the Nuclotron-M project, and he acted not only as a leader, but also as an ideologist. I attended his dissertation and have no complaints about it. This is a completely normal practice
when the same installation, technology, implementation of an experiment is described in just words,
JINR employee Viktor Karpinsky told Gazeta.Ru. - Of course, there was a personal contribution from each of the participants, but we jointly refined the formulations and phrases so that they sounded correct from a technical point of view. I defended myself on the power supply systems of a superconducting accelerator, Andrei Butenko did the same, only with the vacuum system of the Nuclotron. In addition to leading our project, Grigory Trubnikov was involved in stochastic cooling. His work became the final report on the work of the whole team, when the accelerator reached a new level of work. In general, he was one of the leaders, inspirers, thanks to whom the NICA project took place. And thanks to this, a collider is now being built behind me, people are running and pouring concrete, and the collider itself should be launched in 2020.”
Butenko agrees with his colleague. “For a long period of time (more than five years), one of the key people at the Nuclotron accelerator complex at VBLHEP JINR was Grigory Trubnikov. During that period of time, significant results were obtained, which were reflected in his doctoral dissertation,” explains Butenko, head of the accelerator department of the Laboratory of High Energy Physics of JINR. - It is quite natural that it used some materials from the candidate’s dissertations - Karpinsky’s and mine. All complex tasks and decisions submitted for defense were taken with the direct participation of Trubnikov, which allows us to call the achievements under discussion his own as well.
I can only call the “games” around Trubnikov’s dissertation very dirty and undignified.”
According to physicist Andrei Rostovtsev, founder of the Dissernet community, the community initially practically did not consider works in the field of physics, since borrowing descriptions of experiments, methods or installations in them is a common thing.
“According to the rules of the international organization COPE, which deals with academic ethics, the text must be divided into an introductory part, a general statement of the question, results, their discussion and conclusions. Coincidences are allowed in the formulation of the question, coincidences are not allowed in the discussion of the results, and generally not allowed in the conclusions,” Rostovtsev said. - Why should the same experiment be described differently if several people were involved in it? For this reason, Dissernet paints the sections called the introduction in gray rather than in color.”
Mysterious Yakut
Dissernet suggested that there is no Yakut applicant named Pinigin, and his statement is an attempt to settle scores with Trubnikov for his position in the ministry, which he takes precisely on the issue of fighting dissertation factories. By the way, “Pinigin” sent out a letter to members of the authoritative club of scientists “July 1” about Trubnikov’s dissertation, already calling himself an activist of the Yakut branch of “Dissernet”, which does not exist.
It is known that Trubnikov actively advocated for the rotation of expert councils of the Higher Attestation Commission and for new amendments to the Regulations on the awarding of academic degrees. According to one of them, already passed by the Ministry of Justice, dissertations cannot be sent for review to the same council where the original degree was awarded.
It turned out that the ZoLUS (application for deprivation of an academic degree) drawn up against Trubnikov in structure copies the ZoLUS of Dissernet itself, which were previously sent to the dissertation council of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Standardinform", which, after many exposures of false dissertations, was closed by order of the Ministry of Education and Science in December 2017.
Gazeta.Ru, then its deputy chairman Mikhail Lomakin (today continues to sit at the Higher Attestation Commission) promised to sue journalists for trying to infiltrate a meeting of the dissident council.
The meeting at the ministry took place on January 9 in the absence of Trubnikov himself, who was on vacation that day. Based on the situation with Trubnikov, Vasilyeva demanded that the candidate’s and doctoral dissertations of the entire leadership of the ministry be checked - from deputy ministers to deputy department directors.
The decision to check the leadership of the Ministry of Education for plagiarism in dissertations, regardless of the statute of limitations and position, may raise another question for Vasilyeva -
Is it also necessary to conduct a check among rectors - six dozen of them, according to Dissernet, used incorrect borrowings in their dissertations.
“The minister made it clear that plagiarism in dissertations is unacceptable, and even if a person cannot be deprived of a degree due to statute of limitations, then we will be talking about a loss of trust,” a source in the ministry told Gazeta.Ru. According to him, the minister wants Trubnikov to undergo the standard procedure for revising his dissertation through the Higher Attestation Commission and be able to prove the accusations unfounded, otherwise he should be deprived of his doctorate. Trubnikov himself says that he is ready to go through all the procedures to prove that he is right.
