SCIENCE EVALUATION: SOME FEATURES

Scientific work evaluation is becoming an urgent and even a sharp question, raising various discussions as never before. Science, in some sense, has strong immunity, but in re-cent years, it has been rapidly weakened both internally and externally. Of course, we have to believe, that universities will understand that it is firstly on them to save and strengthen both quality of activities and prestige and develop real but not demonstrated science. Europe “has been having a headache” for a long time thinking how to withstand ever - strengthening competition with such regions as North America (especially USA), South-east Asia and so on. It is obvious, that plenty of science work ranking and evaluation systems exist. On the other hand, it is doubtful if any of them is suitable for the whole science direction, science work and university type variety or for other evaluation purposes. In spite of various contradictions, evaluation systems have to be improved, elements, having negative influence have to be sought to eliminate. The Conference ‘Technologies Transforming Research Assessment' took place in Vilnius on March 19, 2014. The attention of the conference was paid to the new and effective technologies of an assessment of scientific publications. One of such technologies ‘Epistemio'. It was stated that it is an effective instrument to manage institutional lists of publications (http://www.epistemio.com). The Snowball Metrics initiative was also introduced. Elsevier`s new generation of SciVal was presented. The evaluation of scientific publications requires to keep the transparency and reliability of the process. On the other hand, universities have to create optimal conditions to all the scientist for scientific activity, to develop encouragement mechanisms. Thus, science quality, science policy formation and other related questions are very urgent in Lithuania. There is no clear and distinct science policy formation mechanism. The expansion of science seeking only pragmatic aims leads only to a deadlock. Science, first of all, is cognition, creation of knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to keep and develop science for the sake of cognition but not just for money.