The ESET Science Award Gala Ceremony 2026 will take place on 15 October 2026. Slovakia’s most visible science prize will then again celebrate excellence in research, and the public has been invited to vote for the Public Award. Before the applause begins, I would like to ask whether the Award applies to itself the standards it honours in others.
What I asked
In late September 2026, I wrote to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the ESET Foundation, to a member of the nomination committee, to the Award’s ambassadors and to the organisers. I began by saying that it is wonderful that the Award exists and is funded. I then raised four questions prompted by the published profiles of this year’s finalists:
- What exactly have some of the nominees contributed to science that is truly exceptional?
- To what extent is the achievement their own, and to what extent is it collective work?
- How credible and verifiable is the information provided about them?
- How do their leisure activities and family relationships, charming as they are, relate to the nomination?
According to its own rules, the Award goes to a personality whose results over the past ten years make Slovak science visible in an exceptional way in the European or global scientific space, with demonstrable impact. Measured against that criterion, the profiles left me uncertain.
Team or individual? Dušan Galusek’s profile credits „the team“ with a new type of reference material for the chemical analysis of rocks, now in patent proceedings. Pavol Čekan’s profile says „his team“ developed the Multiplex8+ diagnostic test for breast cancer. Both look like significant achievements. But is the public asked to honour the team or its leader? How fair is it to attribute the main achievement to one person?
Tentative impact. Zdenko Machala’s profile says he „managed to come closer“ to understanding how plasma triggers programmed cell death in cancer cells. This may well be important. But how is a voter to judge exceptional impact when the description itself is so cautious?
The ten-year rule. Jozef Bátora is presented as the first to conceptualise the European External Action Service as an „interstitial organisation“. This work dates from 2013 and has, by my count, around one hundred citations. Is that exceptional, and how does it square with the rule that the Award recognises results of the past ten years? I also work in this field, and I have argued elsewhere that Professor Bátora and a co-author have published a misleading account of Russia’s ambitions (my critique is here). They never responded to it. Since the Award also claims to assess „contribution to other areas of life“, this seemed relevant.
Verifiability. Michal Hajdúk’s profile states that his DISCONNECT project on loneliness and social isolation contributed significantly to opening a public debate and to changes in this area in Slovakia. When I looked at the project website, I found descriptions of what the project intends to do, but no results, although the two-year project should by now have ended. How can a project with no visible published outputs have had the impact claimed? I asked the organisers to look into this.
My conclusion was that, judging by the profiles, the criteria are applied too loosely for anyone outside the committee to evaluate the candidates.
What I was told
A reply came quickly, on 25 September, from the Award’s Science Affairs Liaison. It was polite, and it conceded one point: that assessing an individual scientist’s contribution to collaborative research is an important and complex question.
The rest was reassurance. The published profiles, I was told, are simplified texts for the general public and do not represent the full basis of the assessment. The Public Award exists to promote science, not to ask the public to judge scientific quality. The finalists went through a thorough evaluation by qualified experts. The organisers therefore have confidence in the process.
What was missing
The reply did not address the two most specific concerns at all: the ten-year rule in the case of Professor Bátora, and the unverifiable impact claimed for the DISCONNECT project.
On individual and collective work, it acknowledged the problem and then moved on. Yet the Award’s practice is to foreground the individual and reduce the team to a passing mention. That does not resolve the difficulty; it sidesteps it.
The explanation of the Public Award is also revealing. If the public is not expected to assess scientific quality, but to support whichever scientist’s „story“ resonates most, then the profiles‘ hobbies and family details make sense. But a popularity vote of that kind sits oddly under the name of a science award.
Nor did the answer come from those responsible for the assessment. Questions about the evaluation of nominees should be answered by the expert committee that evaluated them, not by a liaison officer alone.
I wrote back and asked for exactly that: an official response from the expert committee, with a full and honest consideration of the critical comments raised, in particular those on the two nominees. No such response has arrived.
The irony
„We have confidence in our evaluation process“ is not an argument. No scientist could answer a reviewer that way. In research, a claim is tested against objections, the method is disclosed, and criticism receives a reply on the substance. A journal that answered a documented concern with an expression of confidence in its own peer review would rightly be criticised.
Three things appear to be missing here: honesty in facing uncomfortable questions, transparency about how decisions were reached, and what Slovak calls poctivosť, the conscientious integrity of doing a thing properly. Ironically, these are key criteria of scientific work itself.
An award that celebrates science should be able to withstand the kind of scrutiny that science demands. There is still time before the ceremony for the expert committee to respond. I would be glad to publish its answer here.