Internal institutional regulations and incentives at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in the open science context

The Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI) is the largest Croatian research institution in sciences and science applications with more than 500 academic staff and graduate students employed. In the last few years the RBI has undergone a profound internal restructuring with the aim of achieving its strategic goals. A number of internal regulations and procedures were adopted that enabled a significant step towards increasing scientific excellence. For example, a post-doctoral experience at foreign institutions is introduced as a condition for employment at the RBI, a leadership of competitive projects as a condition for participation in the executive bodies of the Institute, as well as the restrictions on the number of parallel functions and the number of mandates of an individual. Croatian scientists returning from foreign institutions to the RBI are provided with financial funds and working space at the Institute. RBI’s scientific equipment must be open and accessible to potential users. When talking about scientific advancement of individuals at the RBI, the number of required scientific articles published in journals is increased and the emphasis is given to scientific articles published in high-impact journals, while patents and cooperation with the economy are now also taken into account. There is also a mandate at the RBI for depositing digital copies of all publications written by the RBI staff into the institutional digital repository – FULIR, and this mandate is linked with the annual director’s award for the best publications published by the RBI scientists