Hungarian Academy of Sciences issues OA mandate

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) has issued an open-access mandate for the researchers and employees of the MTA - including researchers of the subsidised research units and Momentum research groups.

According to the Hungarian policy, open access can be achieved by self-archiving in institutional or discipline-based repositories or by publishing in open-access journals or in hybrid journals offering paid open access.

The mandate is obligatory for all scientific publications submitted for publication after 1 January 2013.

The default repository is the REAL of the Library of the MTA, but discipline-based repositories could be used wherever available (for example, arXiv or PubMed), and researchers of subsidised research units or Momentum research groups at universities may use their local university repositories. URLs of the Open Access versions of the publications should be entered to the Hungarian National Scientific Bibliography (MTMT) database.

The new policy will allow for embargo periods - if required by the publisher - of up to one year (for articles). If a publisher does not accept any form of open access, publications should be archived in REAL with a closed-access option.