Innovative approach to research motivation system for the university faculty: a case of the Northern Arctic Federal University

Higher Education institutions worldwide are currently expected to meet the requirements that are threefold. First, such institutions have to provide competitive quality education; second, perform research and produce publications; and third, address the challenges the society faces. Clearly, faculty play a crucial role in the success of a university in all the three regards. Due to historical reasons, however, university faculty in Russia have long been primarily and mainly focused on teaching. As a result, regular research as well as publication of the results of such research are rather new and demanding activities for both individual faculty members and university management. Since joining the university ranking race, many universities in Russia have introduced dedicated financial incentives to stimulate research and publication activity of the faculty. One example of the said incentives is monetary bonuses paid to the faculty for their publications in the venues indexed by Scopus and/or Web of Science. The size of such bonuses usually depends on the quality of the publications, namely, the quartile the publication venues belong to. Fewer organizations also compensate their faculty for the number of citations of their scientific publications. Finally, only some universities financially stimulate papers produced in international collaboration. Overall, such a strategy indeed helped several universities in Russia to enter the world ranking lists. However, the existing approach proved to be financially inefficient; besides, it failed to solve the task of engaging more faculty in research and publication activity. In this paper, we outline the innovative approach to the financial bonus system developed and implemented at the Nothern Arctic Federal University (NArFU) in 2022. The geographical location of the University makes it challenging to attract the best scholars to work there. Therefore, the University management considered reasonable to invest in the professional development of the existing faculty. After one year of implementation of the new bonus system, one quarter of faculty have tried and accepted the new incentive system; the University has returned to the trend of the growth of the number of publications; the share of Q1/Q2 publications has increased up to 46% from 40% in 2021, and significantly outnumbered all the previous years; the number of publishing faculty has noticeably increased - 20 new authors; 17 authors published first time in Q1/Q2 journals. In addition, the system focuses on smart distribution of the funds of the University and offers bonuses not for every single publication but for the publication activity dynamics. The new system also transparently supports activities that are crucial for the international university rankings: high quality publications, citations, international collaborations.