One of the ways to counter the continued outflow of university students, and thus also future scientists, from Slovakia is by bringing in foreign students, particularly into doctoral programmes, said chairman of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Pavol Šajgalík. "With the shortage of Slovak students applying for doctoral programmes here, you can't even organise a selection procedure to fill doctoral places. Instead of having a doctoral student spearhead research in a branch of science, as is the case all over the world, supervisors struggle to get students to enrol in doctoral studies," said Šajgalík. Branches of science such as physics and electric engineering are amongst the hardest hit by the shortage of young researchers. The head of the academy can picture a scenario where as many as 70 percent of doctoral students are foreigners.
Foreign scientists, however, will not come to Slovakia if they do not have proper working conditions and even before somebody mentions pay, there are quite a few basic things that have to be sorted out. For example Slovak researchers have just discovered that since the beginning of this year they have been locked out of scientific databases such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys and Knovel because the Ministry of Education has not yet signed an agreement on access to the database and did not pay for the service. Minister Peter Plavčan has promised to solve the problem in the coming days.
