**Background:** Since 2009, all medical faculties in Germany have been awarding a certain proportion of the state research funds to their institutions on a performance-oriented basis (performance based funding, internal Leistungs-orientierte Mittelvergabe, LoM). The internal LoM is an institutional incentive instrument with the aim of rewarding high-quality research via a competitive reward according to defined criteria. The usual criteria for this are annual external funds spent (amount of 3rd party funds) and/or the number of citations in a defined period of time (Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)) of publications per year.
**Aim:** The goal of the project was to develop and introduce a quality-ortiented criterion into the LoM scheme in research to supplement the existing output and quantity-oriented criteria. Furthermore the goal was to develop and implement a criterion that can be efficiently influenced by the reseachers themselves in order to create a possible effective incentives system.
**Approach:** The implementation included mainly 4 processes: 1) field and need assessment, 2) development of the instrument, 3) introduction to the field, stakeholder engagement 4)
baseline description of the publication record
**Results:** In 2019, Charité was the first medical faculty to introduce the free availability of original data on scientific publications (Open Data) as an additional quality-oriented indicator for the LoM. In the following, we report on the important steps and results of the implementation process. Furthermore, we provide a description of relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) at baseline and over time, such as the numbers of publications and authors rewarded, the numbers and research units with open data publications, the development of the amount of annual reward per author and publication, the most frequent journals in which Open Data was published, the field of research, the repositories used, and the Open Access status of the publications.
The development of the instrument: the development (including) testing and validation) of a automated screening tool is a seperate project (see component here and link to publication).
