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Currently, Slovenia invests around 2% of its GDP in scientific research. How much of its budget does the University of Ljubljana and FELU apply to research, and how much money is allocated to Slovenia by the EU?

Slovenia has four universities, about 15 public research institutes and 600 R&D units in companies. 2% of GDP is approximately EUR 800 million and quite a large proportion of this budget goes to companies, with only about 0.5% of GDP going to research and higher education - to the four universities of which the University of Ljubljana is the largest and probably the most established. In terms of output, half of all internationally claimed scientific publications are from University of Ljubljana research. The total number of researchers in Slovenia is about 11,000, of which 40% work in companies and 30% at the University of Ljubljana, with one percent of all researchers at FELU. The University of Ljubljana is allocated EUR 40 million or about 28% of the annual budget of the Slovenian research agency (ARRS) (i.e. EUR 140m) and FELU one percent of the funds from ARRS. From the EU Horizon 2020 projects, the University of Ljubljana is allocated about EUR 8m for research annually.

According to Thomson Reuters, Belgium's KU Leuven is at the top of the annual Reuters Top 100: Europe's Most Innovative Universities (in 2015, the university's research spend exceeded EUR 454m). Despite the budget difference, Reuters placed Slovenia 11th, based on the number of citations, from EU Member States in the period 2011-2015. What are the strengths of Slovenian research?

On the basis of international comparison and taking account of the number of scientific papers per million inhabitants, Slovenes are above the EU average - also by the number of citations, the top 10 most citied papers and even the number of researchers, but then we have less patent applications. ARRS does comparisons on how different disciplines are doing and at the national level it seems that physics and clinical medicine are certainly the fields that are doing very well. I am proud that in the social sciences, our field of economic and business sciences is very successful in terms of number of top publications we have, and we have made tremendous progress since the school decided to be accredited and we are constantly compared to the best business schools in Europe and globally, which encourages strong scientific output on our side. 

KU Leuven is a partner school of the University of Ljubljana and recently there was a visit by Paul Van Dun, the Head of the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) and it was interesting to see the circumstances that they have for work in comparison to what we have. For 45 years and with 90 employees, TTO is about three times larger in terms of number of full time equivalents, they have a tradition and established culture to be able to run collaborative research, licencing and to work on spin-offs and their financial results are evident!

What are the mechanisms that support the FELU Research Policy and what are the research priorities?

We are a big school and international accreditations sometimes state that "FELU is a big fish in a small pond". Our responsibility is to be the regional leader in all economic and business areas, to cover economics, management, accounting, finance, information technology. To encourage regional leadership, we require that all of our professors are active researchers, meaning that they must constantly publish their research output in scientific journals, monographs and book chapters. We also encourage them to hold research seminars where they show their working progress to their colleagues, and also to participate in scientific and professional conferences. We provide them access to a scientific literature database which is a significant investment for the school. Certain areas of research excellence we want to support better and for this we offer additional funds, help with applications for EU projects and help in organising international conferences so that the top researchers come here. We offer best research paper awards and certainly an important element of research policy is that we promote international excellence and interdisciplinary research to connect different fields of knowledge. The priorities for interdisciplinary approach are in the fields of sustainability, competitiveness, supply chain management, international business and leadership.

FELU researchers and their projects have participated in many international projects and have been awarded in Slovenia and abroad. Can you share some recent scientific breakthroughs?

In terms of size, an interesting project is "ISIGrowth" (Innovation-fuelled, Sustainable, Inclusive Growth) led by Dr Patricia Kotnik in cooperation with international partners including Professor William Lazonick who is an established economist, collaborating for years with Professor Tea Petrin. We also have a research group, in which Professor Jože Sambt is involved, that recently published in the Science journal where they deal with fertility and demographic trends. In total we have more than 150 researchers and there are several areas where they can show significant results; supply chain management, international business, sustainability and these are the topics I think we cover pretty well. One area that we are trying to develop now is applying to the EU Research Council (ERC grants). We are also actively participating in the Smart Specialisation Strategy, specifically in the fields that deal with food, tourism and automobile cluster.

"The new tourism strategy will definitely make Slovenia a five-star destination", stated the Secretary-General of the UNWTO, Dr Taleb D. Rifai, in an interview for The Slovenia Times. As FELU research co-created the Strategy 2017-2021, what are the methods that will bring the focus to Slovenian tourism in the future?

Tourism is certainly an important area of FELU research and the approach of our researchers in the area of sustainable tourism will now be implemented in the Strategy 2017-2021 which will be presented in June. Since tourism contributes about 13% of GDP and is responsible for about 8% of total exports, it is certainly an area that deserves special attention. I am proud that our researcher professors, Tanja Mihalič and Ljubica Knežević Cvelbar, are contributing to a strategy that actually positions Slovenia as a green country according to the measures of, for instance, the Environmental Performance Index that rates Slovenia very high.

With the Open Educational Resources (OER) project - teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation and distribution - UNESCO wants to enable universal access to high quality education. What are your thoughts?

This is a very exciting and important area and certainly we believe that the knowledge multiplies if it is shared, it makes a difference in the world. It is certainly our responsibility to enable this transfer of knowledge. Another development area relates to the publishers because when we (as researchers) submit a specific article to a journal we have to accept the conditions of that journal and different publishers have different embargo policies, meaning that in order to have that work available immediately we sometimes have to provide funds for so-called golden access where articles are immediately available without embargo. Bigger countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands, have established negotiating policies at the national level which has resulted in specific conditions for their researchers when they publish with a specific publisher. Slovenia has the disadvantage of being a relatively small player and so the conditions that we are able to negotiate with publishers are different than for larger research communities. There are several other issues connected to the OER since there are many publishers that enable open access are based on author-pays model, which means that the researcher has to pay a submission fee. The number of open access journals has grown tremendously in recent years and we have to be quite careful in considering which journal we choose for publication.