The Russian Academy of Sciences last week ordered its researchers to report
all publications, contact with foreign researchers and trips overseas.
Institutes must ensure that foreigners do not get “information concerning
national security”. “It could be a return to the old Soviet style of control,”
says Betty Kirk of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But
Roald Sagdeev, a Russian physicist now at the University of Maryland at College
Park, thinks the new rules may protect scientists from accusations of espionage.
“We’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” he says.
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