To what extent do monetary incentives encourages researchers to publish in ISI Journals?
What is the status in your institutes and to what extent do you think payment for publication encourage researchers to work more seriously?


I've never worked in an environment with payment for publication, so my impressions are based on observing it from the outside.  I'm sure it encourages publishing more papers, but publishing more papers is different from working more seriously:


Publication payments encourage mediocre submissions, since success is defined by having a paper in a certain type of journal, regardless of how good or bad the paper is.  In many cases the optimal strategy is not to work hard on writing a few excellent papers, but rather to write as many mediocre papers as possible and then submit them repeatedly in a search for lenient editors and reviewers.
In addition to the quality issue, payments per paper create an incentive to break work up into least publishable units.
Publication payments complicate coauthorship decisions, based on how the money is awarded.  If every coauthor receives a fixed amount, then it creates a financial incentive to add honorary authors.  On the other hand, if a fixed amount of money is divided among all the authors, then it creates an incentive to remove less important but legitimate authors.  (And if it's just the "first author," then that magnifies the importance of who that author is.)  Either way, authorship is being decided based partly on financial pressure, rather than intellectual contributions.


Of course, all these issues are already serious problems in academia, with or without publication payments, but adding direct financial incentives just makes them worse.  In addition, using a fixed formula heightens the tension by removing ambiguity.  With hiring, one might worry that hiring committees will count papers instead of judging their quality, but at least some of them will prefer two great papers to five mediocre ones.  By contrast, the incentives with publication payments are unambiguous, which strengthens their effects.