MODERNIZATION OF THE INSTITUTE GRANTING ACADEMIC TITLES TO SCIENTIFIC AND PEDAGOGICAL STAFF OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Taking into account, that science and education in Russia are related to certain priority areas designated by the State and the social development policy, this article is focused on the issues related to the modernization of the academic degrees’ system in Russia. This system is characterized by multiple imperfections that particularly influence the motivation of high-education teaching personnel. In this paper, the authors study several recent problems encountered in the current legal regulation governing the attribution of academic degrees in Russia while observing its inconsistencies and legal contradictions. The paper also contains an analysis of suggested proposals that could be added to the current legal texts, regulating the institution responsible for academic degree attribution. In general, the authors suggest a conceptual approach to modernize the mechanisms of normative legal regulation which organizes the attribution of academic ranks. It is suggested to improve the evaluation system of scientific publications used to evaluate applicants for an academic degree, and to establish a transition towards a point-based evaluation system based on the quality of scientific and educational work. The thesis formulated expresses the need to develop a system of social and material guarantees for the benefit of scientific and educational staff and the implementation of effective means to motivate their educational and research activity.


INTRODUCTION
The first appearance of academic titles has historically been linked to the need of building a system of certifications for scientific and educational staff, motivating them to improve their professional level and, therefore, to develop their career. The attribution of an academic title to teachers in higher educational institutions and employees of scientific organizations is determined by their level of ability to perform complex research and pedagogical tasks. One of the necessary conditions to the deserve a scientific rank is to be a holder of a previous academic degree or a doctor's degree. At the same time, the academic degree on its own cannot be a sufficient condition to obtain the scientific rank of docent or REVISTA PRÁXIS EDUCACIONAL v. 17, n. 45, p. 1-19, abr./jun. | 2021 VITÓRIA DA CONQUISTA | BAHIA | BRASIL professor. It is necessary to "take into consideration the functions expected from a holder of a certain scientific diploma and the duties expected at this level of the educational or scientific hierarchy claimed by the applicant […]" (SENASHENKO, 2017, p. 42), which is a component of prestige for a university professor or a researcher, a means of having their professional merits recognized in the scientific and educational environment. In particular, the attribution of the academic title of "Associate Professor" obliges the applicant to aim for good results in his educational and scientific activities, including publishing of educational papers and scientific articles (manuals, and teaching materials, monographs, articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings); give lectures or conduct other courses at a high professional level, etc.
Recently, discussions have focused more and more on the modernization of the institute attributing academic degrees, within the framework of the State's scientific and educational certification system. While studying the development of the academic degree system from a pedagogical point of view, NA Ivanischeva notes that it is necessary to take international experiences into account especially after the entry of Russia into the Bologna process, which in its turn, requires further educational understanding (IVANISHCHEVA, 2012, p. 106).
Considering the importance of education management at the present moment, L.V. Vesnina, points out the need to solve the educational problems found in the State policy and in the education system as a whole. The strong participation of the State in the education modernization process reflects its historical predominant role in the management of education over the role of individuals and society (VESNINA, 2010, p. 17).
However, the gradual formation of state and public institutions requires the implementation of several changes in the educational management process, ensuring the expansion of their participation in this process. This statement is accurate, since the educational system in Russia is predominantly owned by the state, which is the main (but not the only) initiator of the modernization processes and the source of funds for education. However, it would be wrong to consider the State (represented by its educational management bodies) as the sole initiator of reforms and process evaluation in the education system. (VESNINA, 2010, p. 17).
We must note, that the above mentioned statements are relevant not only for the educational system as a whole, but also for the modernization of educational and scientific certification mechanism in Russia. In the present conditions of constant changes in the Russian scientific and educational organs, reforms are often carried out without seeking an agreement between the different layers of the scientific and educational community, which negatively impacts the quality of activities in this sphere. In several sources, a radical restructuring and even the abolition of the institution granting academic titles in Russia is increasingly demanded, and is often justified by the low efficiency both in terms of assessing the qualifications of individuals and its weak capacity to induce the motivation necessary to improve the professional skills of researchers and teachers.
According to S.A. Vasiliev, "[...] the academic title has become a formal point of reference to which one must strive, but which in reality does not yield anything substantial" (VASILIEV, 2017, p. 33). In this regard, we are interested in quantitative indicators that reflect the numbers of high academic degree holders in the Russian higher educational institutions. According to the data of the National Research University "Higher School of Economy", the number of lecturers (holders of a scientific degree) practicing a teaching activity according to the bachelor's and master's programs; are decreasing since 2017. In 2017-2018 25,9 thousand had the professor rank (24,9 thousand in 2018-2019, 23,7 thousand in 2019-2020 -Orientation procedure for scientific degree candidates until they achieve the highest title of "Professor"; -Evaluation and indirect development of the most advanced scientific journals on the basis of quality content. These scientific journals are the ideal tool for testing the results of a scientific research and the broadcast of its latest significant results which promotes the career paths of teachers and scientists.
It is advisable to consider the following axes as essential to improve the mechanism of scientific degrees' evaluation, used by the State's institute responsible for attributing academic titles: -Revision of the current regulation that organizes the attribution of academic titles for its inconsistency and contradictions, as well as the evaluation of its effectiveness in order to identify the obstacles and execution defects that may be encountered by scientific and educational workers while applying for a desired title; -Conceive strategic suggestions to reform the existing law articles organizing the practices of the institution granting academic titles and the development of new conceptual approaches to modernize the current regulatory legal framework; -Improve the monitoring methodology used to supervise the system of academic titles' functioning by implementing automated information systems and special "artificial intelligence" software.
Furthermore, taking into account A.A Venediktov's position, it is advisable to digitize the process of academic degrees' attribution from the application phase until the issuance of a certificate, and to transform the relevant legal procedures into a digital form (VENEDIKTOV,

2018)
Digitization in today's educational and scientific system is the main development trend For the purposes of our article, it is not possible to consider all of the recommendations suggested above to improve the state's certification system, which is why, the subject of our review will be only two of them: -Monitoring of the current regulatory framework organizing the attribution of university degrees for its inconsistency and contradictions.
-Analysis of reform proposals aiming to modify the existing legal articles governing the attribution of academic titles.
The implementation of a conceptual modernization in the regulation ruling the attribution of academic degrees, will be approached only in its most general terms, because it constitutes in itself a very complex problem of an educational, legal and administrative nature, which requires a number of specialized studies.
The legal base of the reglamentation that organizes the institution attributing scientific ranks is the Federal Law dated on 23 August 1996 № 127-FL (edited on 26 July 2019) "On the Science and State's Scientific and Technical Policy" (RUSSIA, 1996). This law contains the starting point for assessing the scientific qualifications of individuals carrying out scientific activities, the assessment is performed out by the national scientific certification system who is responsible for attributing academic degrees to applicants as well as the attribution of the academic titles of "Doctor", "Associate Professor" and "Professor".
In addition, the law defines the rules to be respected in order to grant the academic titles of "Associate professor" and "Professor", including: -The tasks to be fulfilled in order to obtain the corresponding academic title, -The requirements to be met by the applicants for academic titles, -The examination procedure to be followed in order to obtain an academic title, The basis and procedure of forfeiture and academic titles restoration are established by the Government of the Russian Federation.
The attribution of the academic titles of "Associate professor" and "professor", and the approval of forms and documents submitted for review, are carried out by the federal executive body who is responsible for formulating the state's policy and the legal regulation in the field of scientific and technical activities, which is currently the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. In this regard, it is fair to assume that the diplomas confirming the achievement of a university degree and the certificates conferring academic ranks are, respectively, documents of scientific and pedagogical qualifications. However, in the Law "On Education in the Russian Federation" such diplomas and certificates do not appear in the list of documents that prove education and scientific qualifications.
If we start from the content of the current legislation, this contradiction creates unjustified obstacles in the teaching activity, especially for the individuals who are holders of a scientific degree and (or) an academic rank in their field, but do not have the required training corresponding to the discipline or the course they teach.
Based on the above, it should be concluded that the next legislative action of the federal legislator, should be the immediate correction of this contradiction, which will completely irradicate the reappearance of controversial situations during the application process of the relevant legal articles and avoid any unjustified obstacles that may encounter the highly qualified scientific and pedagogical staff while conducting educational duties.

DEFICIENCY OF THE REQUIREMENTS IMPOSED ON TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS
There is an obvious imbalance in the requirements defined by the regulations on the attribution of academic titles to researchers and teachers.
First of all, unlike the previous regulations, the current one does not contain the academic title of "Senior Researcher", which expresses a certain neglect of the scientific researchers' merits. The legislator considered that it was possible and sufficient to create only two academic titles -"Associate Professor/Docent" and "Professor", equalizing the titles granted to both scientific researchers and teaching employees. At the same time, the nature and the specifics of the work conducted by scientific organizations carrying out scientific research are not taken into account, which gives priority to the educational activity and a lead for the employees of educational organizations.
In support of the above-mentioned thesis, we examine the requirements imposed on applicants for the title of associate professor, and which are established in the regulation on the attribution of academic titles, according to which the applicant must practice educational activities at a minimum rate of 25% (including under part-time employment conditions) following high-education programs, or complementary professional training programs in the same scientific specialty indicated on the application file. The educational activity takes place within the organization that submitted the file for the academic title attribution. Of course, the defenders of this criticized regulation may note that a researcher can still apply for an academic title at the request of an educational institution in which he works parttime. However, the organizations with which the researcher is only linked by intermittent teaching activities, cannot form a complete and objective judgment of the scientific and educational qualifications of the nominee for the title. It seems that the institution responsible for issuing academic titles should be based on equal consideration and recognition of the scientific and educational merits of applicants within its regulatory and legal framework. At the same time, we believe that the abolition of the academic title in the form of "Senior Researcher" is a legislative error.
We can find the same criticized requirement also imposed on applicants for the title of It seems that, it would be possible to remove from the regulation the reference to scientific organizations, which execute educational programs of higher education and have state accreditation, and (or) programs of professional development programs or retraining programs on the base of higher education.
However, it seems that such a solution can only be considered for a near future, but at a strategic level, it seems necessary to return to the previous differentiation between academic titles, referring not only to the addition of the title of "senior researcher" to the state certification system, but by supplementing it with a sort of analogue for the title "professor" dedicated for researchers in the form, for example, of the title "chief researcher" or "professor of the RAS" Among the proposals on the modernization of the university titles system in Russia, suggests entrusting to the thesis councils or a union of professors (non-profit association) the right of preliminary scientific examination of application files presented in order to obtain the academic title of "professor" (KLEANDROV, 2019). This innovation deserves special attention. However, in our opinion, it is necessary to define, as a first step, the approach to be followed in the academic titles attributing process, whether centralized (via the system of public education and science administration) or autonomous (via universities or non-profit organizations).
Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages. At the present time, a combined approach is applied -universities do assessments and apply for an academic title, It should be noted that the point here is not only the name of the academic title, but also the conceptual approach used by the state legal policy in assessing the qualifications of scientists.
It seems that the requirements imposed upon researchers (applicants for academic titles) should be modified on a number of parameters, unlike the case for scientific and educational employees. The merits and qualifications of people who have chosen to work in research as their main activity should be assessed based on the specifics of this line of work, and not by referring it to educational activities, which for many researchers either exist as a secondary activity, or not at all. In this case, and according to the Russian legislation organizing the attribution of academic titles, a researcher does not receive any attention or consideration for his possible successes in scientific activity from the Russian State, which did not provide for such a group of workers special academic titles without reference to educational activity.

SIENTIFIC QUALIFICATION
The disproportion of quantitative factors and qualitative characteristics used in the State's qualification assessment system, is related to a number of significant gaps in the regulatory framework that governs the institute of academic qualifications.
The discussion concerns the conditions to be respected in order to obtain the academic titles of "Professor" and "Associate Professor" as determined by the regulations and according to the number of scientific and educational publications.
Thus, according to the above-mentioned regulation, the applicant for the title of These arguments can be considered reasonable and essential for the modernization of the current certification system, but the option of a radical solution proposed by the Council in 2015 raises some critical observations.
The Council underlined in its declaration several interdependent steps leading towards a radical modernization of the legal framework governing the institution of academic titles attribution.
As a first step, it was suggested to consider as qualified publications, only those publications that appear in one of the international scientific articles databases -Web of If we accept this suggestion in its radical form, the problem would not only be unsolved, but may become more complicated, especially when academic titles become reserved only for the capital's eminent personalities and high-education institutions. As a result, provincial scientists, due to low funding in their regional organizations, and in absence of authoritative scientific journals in their institutions, objectively cannot have a real opportunity to internationally assess their publications.
Practically, in the provinces, not all of the research and teaching teams have a real opportunity to receive a financial support to publish their monographs, since the lobbying centers for this type of funding are not located in the provinces, but in Moscow and St.
Petersburg. The adoption of this proposal into the state certification system could adversely affect the provincial science and the Russian high-education, depriving many young provincial scientists from obtaining an academic title, for the simple reason of not having connections or financial opportunities to publish their work in the most reputable scientific journals. After all, it is known that most journals indexed in international databases do not publish articles free of charge, especially for authors who do not yet have an academic title. In this case we will find ourselves facing the following situation: If a provincial scientist prepares articles of very high If we proceed to the complete abolition of this list of journals approved by the Higher Attestation Commission, the system granting academic titles will be compromised, because young researchers who aspire to obtain their first university degree will not be able to publish their work in scientific journals, mainly because of their financial situation. We are talking here about simple graduate students, young researchers, and not officials of large scientific and educational organizations, who have appropriate financial and organizational resources.
For this reason, existing shortcomings found in the current list of scientific journals do not justify its complete abolition, but calls for an immediate improvement of the selection system by which journals are sorted. in our opinion, radical measures can only lead to an even greater inconsistency in the regulatory framework organizing the system of scientific and educational personnel certification, by destabilizing its practical application. to assess the quality of research theses, the number of which is constantly increasing. Second, it seems that a meaningful scientific assessment of the of the applicants' achievements could be justified -under current legislation -by the same organizations in which they work.
This problem can be solved in a slightly different way. It seems that in this case, it is better to opt towards improvement of the work carried out by the scientific councils included in scientific and educational organizations. These councils will be able to file academic title attribution petitions to the Ministry of Science and superior Education of the Russian Federation.
At the same time, we can work on the modernization of the regulations that organize the evaluation of scientific qualifications, while revising the requirements to be fulfilled by scientific journals in order to be approved in the journal list of the Higher Attestation Commission. Also, the introduction of a point-based evaluation system to assess the publication activity of applicants, this way, it would be possible to have a significant increase in the efficiency of the whole certification system, rather than to choose radical measures targeting existing mechanisms which have been functioning for many years despite their shortcomings.
A number of experts have proposed to temporarily suspend the use of the current regulation on academic certification until the adoption of a new one, which also seems inappropriate, given that a complete suspension of the certification mechanism even for a short period, will have a very negative impact on young researchers, scientists and university academics who are currently in the process of fulfilling the conditions to obtain a university degree. This action will create a situation of uncertainty for them, and the new regulations can still considerably complicate the path to obtain the title "Associate professor" or "professor".
This situation will be destructive for young researchers who currently do not have as much motivation to pursue scientific research.
The implementation of strict certification requirements must necessarily be preceded by an increase in the social and material guarantees, to ensure decent working conditions for young scientists and educators, which will allow them to objectively demonstrate their scientific qualifications, these guarantees could only be obtained through substantial state support. The is set at 4,898.68 euros, and for professors (Professor) and university professors (Universitätsprofessor) it varies according to the level of scientific qualification between 6,085.88 to 7,756.53 euros (GERMANY, 1975), which is a considerably motivating to implement scientific and educational activities and to improve scientific skills.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
The mechanism used by the institute attributing academic titles in the Russian state to assess scientific qualifications, is characterized in its regulatory and legal framework by the presence of significant gaps which require a progressive, verified and scientifically founded reform as part of a modernization program approved by different groups in the scientific and educational community, and not radical restructuring or complete suspension.
From a strategic point of view, the certification of scientific personnel should continue to be included in the public science and education administration system, in order to provide scientific personnel and scientific and educational workers with social and material guarantees as much as possible. At the same time, the evaluation of the scientific achievements -presented by applicants in order to obtain an academic title -must be preserved by the management body of the organization in which they carry out their scientific and (or) educational activities.
The main steps to improve the system of academic titles attribution in Russia should be: -Differentiate between the requirements that have be fulfilled by researchers and those that have to be fulfilled by educational employees in order to obtain a certain academic title, that can be done by taking into account the specifics of scientific research and the elimination of the direct link between the attribution of an academic title and educational activities; -Reform the quantitative and qualitative inconsistency present in the criteria used to attribute academic titles, that can be achieved by applying a point-based evaluation system for scientific publications, as well as for the scientific journals in which they are published, which allows to sort them into groups according to their total score.
It is also necessary to significantly readjust the requirements that need to be met by scientific journals so that they can be approved on the list of the Higher Attestation Commission which is part of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
For an effective functioning of the scientific and educational personnel certification system, it would be necessary above all, to develop a structure of social and material guarantees for this category of employees and to put in place effective means to motivate the development of their scientific and educational activities.