Starting this year, Masaryk University has introduced a groundbreaking innovation: contracts with its faculties and institutes. The contracts will be linked to the funding of research at MU.
The ten MU faculties plus CEITEC and the Institute of Computer Science have made a commitment to achieve strategic objectives in research and doctoral studies. The contracts were drafted by each faculty or institute based on an internal evaluation by international expert panels, which took place in 2022, and also based on their own strategies and university priorities. The contracts were then approved by the university’s management and signed earlier this year as part of the annual evaluations.
As for funding the university’s educational activities, it has been following the principles of contract funding for the past several years, except that the terms of the contracts are set out in the budgeting rules themselves. From now on, the contracts will also cover part of the institutional support for long‑term conceptual development, i.e. research activities, received from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.
The new research and doctoral studies contracts will run until the end of 2027. They took over the role of the “stabilising” component of the Masaryk University’s budget, which is now called “contract” component and will account for 65% of the institutional support for research and doctoral studies. The remaining 35% is the “performance” component of the MU budget, which is determined according to the results achieved in a defined set of publication and grant indicators.
The contractual component is based on the original share of each faculty and institute in the institutional support, which was fixed in order to maintain financial stability after 2019, when the change in the national system of research evaluation and funding introduced in 2017 first took effect at universities.
“I view the introduction of contract funding as a stabilising element in the funding of science and research at Masaryk University. It is another step supporting the principles of sustainable funding inspired by international practice at top research institutes,” says MU Bursar David Póč.
Contract funding of research is a common practice abroad but quite rare in the Czech Republic. Masaryk University is the first Czech university to introduce it. Its main objective is to help create a stable environment for excellent research and high‑quality doctoral studies.
“We have successfully implemented the first step, where faculties and institutes developed their own strategic plans and set procedures and objectives for further development and progress. These have been, of course, thoroughly discussed with the MU management to make sure that they are in line with the university’s mission and ambitions and that they fulfil the institutional strategy. It is the effort to meet these commitments, to adapt the strategy to current circumstances and to improve the quality of research that we will take into account in the future when evaluating the faculties,” says Šárka Pospíšilová, MU Vice‑Rector for Research and Doctoral Studies.
Changes in research funding
Institutional funding of research from the state budget is a key stabilising element that is not directly dependent on success in grant competitions. Until 2019, the distribution of institutional support in the Czech Republic was governed by a methodology unofficially known as the “coffee grinder”, which favoured publication activity and converted publication points directly into budget money. With the change of approach at the national level and the gradual implementation of a new methodology after 2017 (Methodology 2017+), Masaryk University began to change its internal research funding accordingly.
“When the ministry changed the way research and university funding are evaluated, we started reforming our own internal system and tried to make sure it included both a performance incentive component and a stabilising component, in contrast to the previous “coffee‑grinder” system. For each faculty, we first fixed its institutional support at the 2019 level as a fixed‑level grant. Over the following years, each year‑on‑year budget increase was distributed according to a new formula based on a set of indicators reflecting the parameters of excellent publication and grant activity. In 2025, this performance component will account for 35% of the research,” says Michal Petr, head of the MU Centre for Scientometric Support and Evaluation.
All contracts are available online.
Starting this year, the remaining 65% of the budget will be made up by contract funding. “It is important to have some degree of stability and predictability in the budget because the grant and publication success of each faculty varies from year to year, so we cannot just distribute all the funding based on performance. However, this stabilising component now carries a new strategic importance and is linked to contracts concluded by the MU management with its faculties and institutes,” says Petr.
The contracts particularly highlight the commitment of each faculty and institute to play their part in implementing the MU research and doctoral studies strategy. Each year, the university management and the faculties will discuss whether the objectives in the contracts are being met or perhaps need to be adjusted due to current circumstances at annual evaluations and also through the Internal Evaluation Board.
“The purpose of the contract is to ensure mutual support and to create space for the faculties and institutes to work on long‑term strategies, where the traditional publication indicators are not the only measure of success. Our common goal is to achieve excellence in research and doctoral studies. The university management will continuously monitor the performance of the contracts and, at the end of the contract period, evaluate whether the faculties and institutes are taking all the necessary steps to meet their objectives,” says Vice‑Rector Pospíšilová.
What awaits the faculties
Each faculty and institute developed its own strategic vision and ways of its implementation.
For example, the contract of the Faculty of Law revolves around introducing a new system of evaluating research, retaining the existing excellent research teams and transferring their skills and experience to other faculty departments. The faculty also plans to reduce the number of programmes offered in doctoral studies. You can read the full contract of the Faculty of Law here.
The Faculty of Medicine has set 12 objectives ranging from promoting interdisciplinarity and applied research to developing infrastructure for precision medicine, reorganizing its PhD programme, and monitoring the employment of PhD graduates and their career paths. You can read the full Faculty of Medicine contract here.
The Faculty of Science plans to further improve its international competitiveness and the internationalisation of science and research and to complete the doctoral studies reforms that are already under way. In particular, it plans to identify strong and original research topics and ideas and the most promising researchers. It also wants to strengthen project support, reduce academic inbreeding and encourage researchers to participate in international exchange. The faculty would also like to create a MUNI Natural Sciences PhD School. You can read the full contract of the Faculty of Science here.
The Faculty of Arts plans to develop its grant activities and work on the internationalisation and rationalisation of its doctoral study programmes. In addition to the new grant strategy, the faculty would like to institute mandatory international internships for most academic positions and increase the number of international academic staff. The faculty leadership would also like to convince the academic community of the need to change the evaluation of research performance at the faculty so that it is not 100% performance‑based. You can read the full contract of the Faculty of Arts here.
The Faculty of Education will focus on addressing socially relevant topics in education and other related disciplines, attracting projects of strategic importance, developing topics with international and interdisciplinary overlap and strengthening the international aspect of its doctoral studies. More specific measures are described here.
The main objectives of the Faculty of Pharmacy include improving the quality and efficiency of the doctoral studies programmes by merging them into one, increasing the number of international project applications and strengthening the relationships with research teams from the faculties based at the MU campus with excellent grant and publication results, and raising more funding through cooperation with the research application sector. The Faculty of Pharmacy contract is available here.
The Faculty of Economics and Administration aims to build strong research teams capable of achieving excellence or high societal relevance, to improve its publication performance and quality to the level of good European universities and to create an open and international research environment. You can read the full contract of the Faculty of Economics and Administration here.
The Faculty of Informatics plans to become an internationally recognised research centre, an excellent institution for educating doctoral students and a competitive and sought‑after employer. The specific steps to achieving these ambitious goals can be found in the contract.
The Faculty of Social Studies has set six main objectives. Its priorities include reducing the gender imbalance in associate‑ and full‑professor positions, reducing academic inbreeding, increasing the faculty involvement in international grant projects, and supporting publications in prestigious journals. You can read the full contract of the Faculty of Social Studies here.
The Faculty of Sports Studies aims to promote excellent research and high‑quality doctoral studies by facilitating the establishment of three new departments with a specific research focus, whose research strategies have been developed in collaboration with the members of the Faculty’s International Research Council. It plans to strengthen its research collaboration ties with the industry, government and local authorities and to limit the number of PhD students per supervisor and standardise the requirements for supervisors. The contract of the Faculty of Sports Studies is available here.
The contract of the Institute of Computer Science includes a number of specific measures, including introducing academic positions to strengthen its research staff capacity and to start using performance indicators from the applied sphere alongside the current ones. You can read the full contract of the Institute of Computer Science here.
CEITEC MU has five strategic priorities broken down into specific steps, such as recruiting a junior research group leader through an open international competition every two years. The institute also plans to modernise its system of scientific evaluation and develop a strategy for the sustainability of shared laboratories, ensure better integration and respect for its administrative staff and establish a fund to support research activities. You can read the full CEITEC MU contract here.
While contracts are very important within Masaryk University itself, they can also be used as a source of information for evaluations at the national level and so play a role in the research funding received by the university. The new research funding model rooted in an appropriate ratio of contracts and performance‑oriented indicators will, according to the university management, cultivate the research environment at the university and facilitate the development and fulfilment of long‑term strategic and conceptual objectives, particularly the shared goal of high‑quality research competitive at the international level.