With General Secretary Gorbachev and President Reagan scheduled to meet in Moscow this week, bets are on that the two leaders will be singing the praises of glasnost. But the policy of more openness (less censorship) has affected "only domestic media such as magazines and newspapers," says Thores Medvedev, an-exiled Soviet scientist, now at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Indeed, despite the recent appearance of a number of prominent Soviet scientists at foreign meetings, the broader population of USSR researchers remains as isolated now as in the past when it comes to publishing work in non-Soviet journals.
An analysis of articles published by Soviet scientists in journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has revealed no significant increase in the number published in western journals between 1984 (before glasnost) and 1987. Only 17% (or about 5,100 out of 29,300) of Soviet articles surveyed in 1984...
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