Global Digitalization as a Challenge to Research Organizations and Research Universities in Ukraine: Conceptual Problems and Their Solutions

Abstract

The article highlights the challenges faced by Ukrainian research organizations and research universities (RORUs) amidst global digital transformations, with emphasizing the problem of the existing digital divide caused by impossibility of their connection to complex digital metasystems. The research process involved general scientific methods of abstraction, analysis and synthesis. The information sources for analysis were reporting documents on realization of research projects, statistical data on directions and scopes of digitalization, coming from official and commercial entities. As shown by the study, the previous phase of global digitalization was characterized by its penetration in all the activities of human life, the transition to a new technological reality and aggravation of the problems related with adaptation to it. Given the boosting scopes and diversity of data and information, in particularly ones pertaining to research and education activities, some of the domestic RORUs are incapable to build the material and technical facilities required for their processing, accumulation and storage. All the significant fundamental scientific results in natural sciences and humanities are being produced now by use of large digital systems: supercomputers, artificial intellect technologies, artificial neural networks. Digital technologies could have the most effective manifestation in the phenomenon of science & technology convergence characterized by rapid rates of growth in the scientific component and its transformation into the science & technology one. Planning, organization and performing of scientific research are now impossible without integration of research problems with digital technologies designed for processing, accumulation and storage of scientific information, which are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, sometimes transforming into powerful digital metasystems. The level of digitalization in the majority of domestic RORUs are essentially basic, being confined to the communicational component (access to Internet, communication means, online databases, mass media), which does not conform global tendencies. The conclusion is made about the importance of further studies of the scales of digital divide in domestic RORUs, aiming to find solutions for their connection to digital metasystems in the context of the accelerated digital transformations.