Incentive Policies for Scientific Publications in the State Universities of Chile

Most state universities in Chile (15 out of 18) have monetary incentive policies for scientific publications, but they are based on criteria that do not necessarily aim to improve institutional performance in all disciplines. This work compares affinities and differences of these policies in three areas: (i) type of publications encouraged, (ii) beneficiaries, and (iii) monetary amounts per type of publication. It was found that the 15 universities encourage publications with WoS indexing, 13 do so for Scopus and SciELO, and 6 are open to other databases. Only seven institutions encourage the production of books and book chapters. As expected, the 15 universities direct the incentives to their academic staff, although with different requirements, six accept non-academic staff, and only one university considers its student body. In general, the highest monetary amounts are received by WoS publications, with differentiation by quartile or impact factor of the journal. All in all, there is a clear need to design incentive policies in universities that are more homogeneous and take into account the “quality” and “impact” of the research they publish based on different metrics that tend to provide robust analyses in the different areas of knowledge.