European Science Policies

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, European science plunged into a period of regional isolation and the breakdown of established international ties. As a result, rumour replaced reliable verifiable information. A notable case in point was the attempt to celebrate the 70th anniversary of M.I. Rostovtzeff (1870‒1952), a prominent historian of the first half of the twentieth century, who lived and worked in the United States. In the run-up to the anniversary, rumours of the death of Rostovtzeff began to circulate among immigrant historians in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Unable either to verify reports of his death or to verify that Rostovtzeff was alive, European academic community declined both to commemorate the anniversary and to hold memorial events. Perhaps it was the director of the Kondakov Institute in Prague in 1939‒1945, N.E. Andreev, who disseminated rumours about the death of M.I. Rostovtzeff, thus trying to avoid involving the European and North American academic community in the celebration, which would have necessitated publicly soliciting the support of the pro-Nazi authorities of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, on which the Institute depended. Throughout the period of the II World War, colleagues could not get acquainted with each other’s work. In the post-war period, the structure of European science did not return to the point of the beginning of the crisis of the late 1930s. The new transformation was due to the redistribution of spheres of political influence in Central and Eastern Europe and the formation of new barriers to scientific communication.

This article investigates the taken-for-granted notion of scientific mobility as fundamentally "global." We use self-reported biographical profile data of over a hundred thousand scientists from ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) who received a Ph.D. between the 1980s and 2010s. These data are advantageous over data commonly used to trace scientific mobility like surveys and disambiguated bibliometric data, as ORCID data offer both publication histories and a curriculum vitae itemization of scientists' education and employment. We find that scientists who do move internationally in their careers increasingly move within the same transnational region. Furthermore, while we find that mobility between countries has remained stagnant since the 1980s as compared to mobility within countries , scientists who move internationally do so more frequently but for shorter distances. European and Asian Ph.D. holders comprise the majority of scientists who are driving these trends.