Hey @lemouth,
sorry for having caused confusion at this point and I should have specified "fiatscience" which may also include privately funded research in corporate setting arrangements. As my projects are mainly cryptofunded (I'm probably also in a minority) I see -as Ludvig Fleck might have said- a certain style (not only referring to disciplines) shaping certain ways of "doing" science. As much as I've been a critic of science or R&D funded by industries, I also saw and made myself the experience how bureaucratic aparatus can destroy promising ideas and critics can turn into skeptics destroying entrepreneurship and helpful and promising projects that would have actually survived on a market (outside of academia), when state funded (maybe as a lack of understanding or lack of contacts to people being active in the field (practice?)). As you wrote yourself you are still "friends" with your colleagues and "decided to refuse to write any referee report on any scientific manuscript or project in which Russian institutes are involved.", regardless what stance those scientists working in those Russian institutes have on the conflict: They are obviously not free. In your last paragraph/sentence with your word "disagreement" you made clear what position and at the same time shed light on what kind of contradictions might be in place at this point. To give you an example: I was asked if I would give a talk on a podcast just last week and I gave the founder of the podcast who is Russian the possibility to explain himself, what his thoughts on all this are and I told him to take time off and care for his other relatives in Ukraine as well. We definitely will have a cooperation when he resolves his issues in private life. As you correctly mentioned the open letter against the war, on an individual/personal level looks different but there are those institutions and institutionalization tendencies (in your case) that make a collaboration impossible for you. At this point I question how good one can separate a professional life of a scientist and their activities on instiutional/public level, esp. now that Corona era put our professional activities into the homeoffice (if not being a researcher in a lab). When I said open I didn't refer to open access per se when it comes to publishing but rather questioning how open one can be as a scientist with his own opinion/experiences and what impact it has/did not have on science or the work that they are doing. We might have seen that ideologically induced science might have not worked or represent reality in a sound way but we have seen that dictatorships are not necessarily producing bad science. How open/accessible/democratic science in academia (in certain countries is/can be) might be a topic for a separate post and my first comment might have been too short to sensitize for words we are so (over)used to already. You said:
If tomorrow I want to switch gears and work in the domain of biophysics, I can do it. So whereas there is a connection with funding, science is still free.
And I'm curious if you would be able to switch to philosophy/philosophy of science/chemistry. Would you be free to switch to do science in a different way by refusing publishers or the very core of writing and express your research in artistic ways? Would you be still accepted among your colleagues as one of them or would there be another "public" emerge more interested and sharing a deeper understanding then in how you do science?