"President Nursultan Nazarbayev has long wanted more of Kazakhstan’s scientific research turned into products that spur the economy and create good jobs.

"A new center in Astana is helping the country realize that goal by introducing an international system for evaluating research proposals.......

"Besides ensuring that applied-science projects get more consideration, another objective of the center is ensuring that research grants are awarded on merit and not cronyism — or whom a researcher knows. To help achieve that goal, the new evaluation system requires that two of the three experts analyzing any request for government-funded research be from outside Kazakhstan.

"A third center goal is helping Kazakhstan scholars understand how to get their research into the world’s top academic journals. Scholars from the West and Asia dominate those journals, with researchers from the former Soviet Union lagging far behind."

HAL FOSTER, The Baltimore Post-Examiner, · JULY 10, 2012