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When open science is open but not for everyone

Article news.ycombinator.com

When open science is open but not for everyone

...or how cancel culture made its way to academia

An actor misbehaved - you stop going to its movies. A company got involved in some shady shit - you stop buying from it. Sounds like sound logic aligned with an image of having principles, right? Well, how about not allowing folks into academic conferences? And not because they personally did something you do not like, but because they come from a certain country?

My name is Andrey. I am ex-big tech software engineer who decided to switch to academia and went back to school. One of the best tech schools in Russia - Skoltech. The one that is currently being cancelled.

Long story short:

My extremely talented colleagues (the ones I look up to on daily basis) have been rejected from CVPR (a top tier academic conference) purely because of their affiliation with Skoltech.

Specific papers:

- Switti: Designing Scale-Wise Transformers for Text-to-Image Synthesis (Yandex, HSE, MIPT, Skoltech, AIRI, ITMO); - Color Conditional Generation with Sliced Wasserstein Distance (Skoltech);

- MaterialFusion: High-Quality, Zero-Shot, and Controllable Material Transfer with Diffusion Models (HSE, AIRI, Skoltech);

- Good Keypoints for the Two-View Geometry Estimation Problem (Skoltech, Slamcore).

Screenshot - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gpm-cEdWQAIU4uU?format=jpg&name=large

Why it matters:

There are only a handful of respected conferences that truly matter in academia. You want to be heard? Publish there or perish.

Why it is wrong:

As humanity, we are where we are because even at darkest times we find a way to talk and collaborate. If you do not like someone personally, surely you do not have to play with them. It is basic free will. But do you want to live in the world where people cancel others based on their origin as a whole group? What if it is not about business and profit, but about making the world a better place together through science?

One could argue that it is only Skoltech - a single uni in Russia. Guess what? It is not. Other top-tier schools (HSE, MIPT) are under sanctions and face the same treatment. And not only schools. A few companies that have the resources to fund the research are in the same boat. You want to do good research in Russia - not too many options.

I get that conferences hosted on the US and EU soil have to comply with the laws. It is inevitable. Yet these laws are there to restrict for-profit business, not academia!

The world is dark and full of terrors. It is hard to navigate living from one crisis to another. Yet people somehow manage to keep their obsession with science. They keep grinding and want to share their findings with the world. Since when this kind of behavior should be punished? Could you remind me when division of millions of people into "good" and "bad" worked well? Ever? WTF?

Final message:

World is complicated and unfair, but we can make it better bit by bit. Not through division, but through staying connected and doing our best to find common ground. Science and non-profit are universally good for all of us. Shall we start there?

Discussion 1 comments · 5 points · fxlrnrpt · 2025-04-28
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