The location where scientists reside should be irrelevant - at best the venue where it was published should matter (I can understand that some obscure journals in other languages may be skipped in favor of more well-known (ACM/IEEE/ACL/...) English language conferences or journals), and it's not that Schmidhuber was hiding from the mainstream outlets.

In the age of globalization, it's getting harder to justify ignoring anything out there.