Collapse of Conicyt. The third 26-3-16

Sir:

In recent months, demonstrations of discontent by scientists in front of the Conicyt building and the Government Palace have been frequent. What's going on?

On the one hand, the problems focus on the absence of an institutionality for the design of national scientific-technological development policies and their respective financing. On the other hand, there is the inability of Conicyt to attend to the beneficiaries of scholarships and research projects: more and more demands and paperwork are impossible to handle with the current staffing.

Several months are necessary to certify compliance with our obligations as researchers, and you can not start a research project or a scholarship if you do not prove that you fulfilled the previous obligations contracted with Conicyt.

Hundreds of research (and life) projects are halted and at risk of failure. Are we guilty until we prove otherwise? Delayed results of competitions, scholarship renewals and research projects have researchers desperate.

Unfortunately, one thinks that the best person we can find, as is the case with the new president Mario Hamuy, will not be able to fix its functioning.

This seems to be the end of the end for Conicyt: a decrease in the number of funded projects and young researchers in training; an incomplete Presidential Advisory Council with outdated regulations (more than 40 years old) and a Civil Society Council that has not met since November 2014.

It will take years to achieve the announced new institutionality and we will have to continue working with what we now have: Conicyt is part of the current system and will undoubtedly be part of the new one. It is a dead end and we do not see a concern of the Mineduc, where this commission is anchored, to solve these problems.

Jorge Babul
Council of scientific societies

@ConsejoSocs
@JorgeBabul

Source: The third