The Academy of Romanian Scientists noted with surprise the existence of a legislative initiative to abolish the AOSR. The arguments behind this political gesture are abusive and do not correspond to the truth. A number of clarifications are necessary in this respect.
- The initiative to abolish the Academy of Romanian Scientists expresses a purely political project, which uses arguments alien to the truth and the field of scientific research, based only on null and void “value” judgments, persistently conveyed in the public environment, in a kind of collective indictment, supported by slanderous definitions.
- The Academy of Romanian Scientists is an institution that is part of the contemporary history of the country, with an age of almost a century. It was founded on March 29, 1935 under the name of the Romanian Academy of Sciences by the liberal Minister of Public Instruction and Religious Affairs, Dr. Constantin Angelescu, an eminent politician of the country, out of the need to create a broader academic framework for scientific research. Since its foundation, ASR has included in its ranks great personalities of Romanian science and culture, as well as of world science, including eight Nobel laureates (honorary members). After the fall of the communist regime, the institution operates as the Academy of Romanian Scientists, by Law No. 31 of 15 January 2007, as “continuator and sole legatee” of the Romanian Academy of Sciences.
- The Academy of Romanian Scientists is, by statute and by its entire activity, an apolitical institution, having no connection with any party in Romania. The political choices of some of the members of the AOSR, who are active in various parties in Romania, and not in a single one, a right guaranteed by the Constitution, do not commit the institution. Therefore, the AOSR is not a “sinecure factory” of a particular political party, as slanderously claimed in the political argumentation of the initiative to abolish it.
- The structures of the Academy of Romanian Scientists include personalities of Romanian education, research and science, with work, activity and results at the level of academic excellence, recognized nationally and internationally, with an impressive number of citations and appearances in BDI. The scientific work of the AOSR is a complex one, carried out within the framework of the Annual Research and Development Programme. In 2019, before the suspension of the institution’s funding by political decision, this Programme included 23 projects, over 40 ISI-listed or BDI-indexed articles. The value of the scientific activity carried out in the Academy of Romanian Scientists is also attested by the fact that the institution is ranked 8th among Romanian research institutions in the prestigious SCIMAGO-Elsevier international ranking, which evaluates and ranks the world’s universities and research institutes in terms of performance. It is important to mention that in this ranking, in the first 800 places, there are only two academic presences from Romania: the Romanian Academy, ranked 676th, and the Academy of Romanian Scientists, ranked 794th. It is also significant that such a ranking was achieved at a time when the AOSR only received between 1 and 1.5% of the total funds allocated from the state budget to finance the academies established by law. The suspension of funding from the state budget by political decision, starting in 2020, is a blow to the institution that puts its very existence at stake.
In the data defining the institutional identity of the Academy of Romanian Scientists, at the level of its history and founders, of its members over time and today, of the activity and performance achieved, to speak of the AOSR as a “factory/factory of sinecures” of a political party or dedicated to certain persons, about “almost non-existent” scientific activity, to throw into play minimizing comparisons, which bring the image of the institution into disrepute, shows either ignorance or bad faith, either one or the other, in the direction of a political project whose target has become AOSR, increasingly insistent in the Romanian political space by its initiators.
The Academy of Romanian Scientists expresses its indignation and outrage at the tendentious, essentially slanderous and denigrating way in which the institution is treated and strongly protests against this discriminatory treatment, built on false arguments, which violates and defies all rules of political correctness.
For anyone interested in finding out the truth, the doors of the AOSR are open. The institution makes available to those who want to know its institutional reality documents, data, statistics, any kind of relevant information, since its foundation, almost a century ago, until today, in an act of total transparency.
Scientific Council of the Academy of Romanian Scientists