President: We must change approaches to development of domestic science
Addressing the participants, the Head of State congratulated them on the 70th jubilee of the Academy and highly appraised its role in development of modern Kazakhstan.
“The National Academy of Sciences is a large intellectual centre uniting sectoral and regional divisions. Like the academies of sciences of France, the U.S. and other countries, it does not handle various administrative problems. As the global experience shows, centralization and monopoly in science sector is ineffective,” said the President.
Nursultan Nazarbayev emphasized the Academy’s role in formation of Kazakhstani science and stressed the importance of using the country’s scientific potential in implementation of his State-of-the-Nation Address “The Third Modernization of Kazakhstan: Global Competitiveness.”
The Head of State pointed out several problematic issues in administration and coordination of research activity in Kazakhstan.
“We have decentralized our science sector. The majority of research centres function now on the ground of universities, but they have not become innovative centres yet. Kazakhstani scientists actively patent the results of their research works. Unfortunately, most of these discoveries are not implemented. Government is the main sponsor of science. Lack of orders from real sector and plagiarism remain one of main problems of our science to date,” noted the President.
In this connection, the Head of State commissioned to dramatically change the approaches to the development of domestic science and set a number of certain objectives in this area.
“We have adopted the Law on Commercialization of the Results of Scientific and Scientific-Technical Developments. Now we need full-fledged implementation of this Law. We need to implement the mechanisms orienting the scientific-research developments towards the needs of Kazakhstani enterprises. We need to develop import substitution and export production,” Nazarbayev added.
The President emphasized also the importance of improving the quality of expertise of research projects in fundamental sciences and humanities by means of attracting the Academy’s potential.
The Head of State initiated to establish a special department for ethics in the Academy which could develop a Researcher’s Code of Ethics and a Code of Ethics on Publications.
The President commissioned the Ministry of Education and Science together with the Academy and universities to promote domestic scientists’ publications in international rankings database.
The President commissioned also to issue additional grants for the best researchers to let them undergo traineeships at the world-class research centers. He also requested to discuss the issue of possible allocation of grants for the researchers from the CA region for conducting their scientific activity in Kazakhstan.