© RIA Novosti. Alexei NaumovAcademy of Sciences
The bill outlining the reform passed the Federation Council with 135 members voting in favor and two abstaining.
Its main provisions transfer the management of most academic property to a new federal government agency and merge three previously existing academies - focusing on the sciences in general, medicine and agriculture - into one, but bar the state from interfering in the academy's scholarly activities.
An earlier version of the bill approved by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, provided for the abolition of the academy, but the bill was reworked considering strong protests from the scientific community.
While the academy is to retain the right to shape the research agenda of its numerous institutes and distribute budget funds for research projects, opponents of the reform have worried how large a role the new property management agency - to be created under the new law - will play in the affairs of the academy, which will officially be a federal state-funded establishment.
The property management agency will be answerable directly to the prime minister, who will also appoint the head of the agency, a decision subject to presidential approval. The incumbent head of the academy, Vladimir Fortov, will stay in office for at least three years, according to the legislation, to take effect after being signed by President Vladimir Putin.
The reform has led to a public clash between scientists and authorities, with academy supporters holding numerous protest rallies countrywide since July.
Moscow police estimated the number of demonstrators outside the Federation Council building on Wednesday at about 200. Four protesters were briefly detained for disturbing the peace, as the rally was unauthorized, the police press service told RIA Novosti.
Despite decades of decline since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Academy of Sciences is still the country's leading scientific research establishment comprising about 50,000 researchers in its 434 affiliated institutions.
Critics have attributed the decline to the academy's cumbersome and obsolete structure.
While reading Russian sources on the subject, what really jumps out is this secrecy and urgency with which this bill has been written and Ok'ed. This bill deals with property rights. And it looks like now all scientific research papers will be property of the federal government which will decide what scientific work will be published and where, and which will not. And since three branches of the Russian academy are the subjects of this bill, 'focusing on the sciences in general, medicine and agriculture", the aim of this bill involves some interdisciplinary studies. It maybe that some real scientific breakthrough was made recently in the area of these interdisciplinary scientific studies.
From Wiki about natural sciences: [Link]
There are also a subset of cross-disciplinary fields which, by the nature of the problems that they address, have strong currents that run counter to specialization.
Put another way: In some fields of integrative application, specialists in more than one field are a key part of most dialog. Such integrative fields, for example, include nanoscience, astrobiology, and complex system informatics.