The way heads of state-funded research institutes under the Prime Minister's Office are evaluated is being completely overhauled. The core change is to assess institute heads separately from their institutions, enabling not only performance-based pay decisions but also recommendations for dismissal. At the same time, how well research institutes meet government demand is emerging as a key benchmark in their self-evaluations, raising concerns that "tailored research" catering to ministries could increase, pushing critical research and long-term policy projects to the back burner.
According to relevant ministries on Monday, the board of the National Research Council for Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences (NRC) recently finalized the "2026 Research Institute Evaluation Manual" containing these measures and notified its 24 affiliated research institutes and one attached institution of the new evaluation standards.
The most notable change is the separation of institute head evaluations into an independent category. Previously, an institute's overall evaluation score was directly reflected in its head's performance-based pay. Going forward, however, institute heads will undergo separate written and in-person assessments. The evaluation criteria include participation in and support for national policy, efforts to achieve management goals, contributions to institutional development, and efforts to improve policy sensitivity. The results will serve as the basis for calculating institute heads' performance-based pay, and a "very poor" rating can be used as grounds for recommending dismissal.
In the research institutes' self-evaluations, the weight given to responsiveness to government demand has increased significantly. With the abolition this year of the Project-Based System (PBS), under which institutes funded personnel and operating costs by winning external projects, a new category called "research process and quality management" was created to strengthen ties with government demand across all stages of research, carrying a weight of 100 points. Of this, government support satisfaction is incorporated as a 50-point quantitative indicator, in which the Office for Government Policy Coordination surveys government agency clients on the research process and quality of outcomes for each project and converts the results into scores.
Customer satisfaction surveys themselves existed before, but their weight and character were markedly different. Previously, it was merely a 7-point detailed indicator under the "internal and external communication" item within the management category, and the survey targets included not only government agencies but also industry, academic, and research clients. In the new manual, by contrast, the satisfaction of government agency clients alone has been separated out and elevated to a core quantitative indicator in the research category. This is read as an intent to make responsiveness to government demand itself the central pillar of research institute evaluations.
An NRC official said, "There was internal discussion that, since financial resources previously earned through external commissioned research will now be provided as government contributions, the evaluation system should also be revised accordingly so that institutes can faithfully perform their original function of supporting government policy."
However, some point out that as government support satisfaction takes up a larger share of evaluations, the independence of research institutes could be threatened. While competition over commissioned projects will decrease with the abolition of PBS, pressure for "ministry-tailored research" out of concern for evaluation scores could actually grow. Concerns are also raised that research reaching conclusions at odds with the government's policy direction, or structural reform research that takes a long time to produce results, could be pushed aside.
Kang Gu-seob, dean of the College of Education at Chonnam National University and a former state research institute member, said, "Researchers at government-funded research institutes hold both a desire to contribute to government policy and an identity as researchers. In a structure where they must unconditionally follow ministries' positions without their expertise being respected, it is difficult to produce proper research."
He added, "While it is necessary for ministries to evaluate research outcomes to some degree, we must prevent a situation where that weight becomes excessive and research institutes become subordinate to ministries. This atmosphere is one of the major reasons why a high proportion of researchers at government-funded research institutes move to universities."
