Hungary’s OA Policy Updates | PASTEUR4OA

"The OA mandate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) is one of the few ROARMAP entries from Hungary. The mandate has been effective since 2013 and is itself quite unusual as MTA is a complex organisation. MTA comprises a network of research centres and institutes and also acts as a research funder, supporting several research groups from various Hungarian Universities. MTA is also a learning society. This mandate is colour-neutral: it accepts both the Green and Gold OA routes for compliance. For Green OA, publications can be deposited in the MTA repository – REAL – or in subject repositories like arXiv or PubMed Central. Deposit in institutional repositories hosting MTA-supported research groups is also acceptable. Without the existence of the Hungarian Scientific Bibliography database (Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára, MTMT), the effectiveness of such a mandate could not be monitored. In 2014 MTMT developed an OA compliance monitoring tool with support from SIM4RDM (a FP7 research data management project, see the final report). The monitoring tool can deliver OA publication statistics both for organisations and for individual researchers. Researchers are able to view their individual OA statistics for a chosen range of years, showing all of their OA or closed access publications. Institutional administrators can check the OA scores of their organisation – for MTA, joint statistics can be displayed on the whole research centre network as well as specific statistics on individual centres, institutions and researchers. The MTA mandate not only requires researchers to make publications openly available, but OA compliance also features in the evaluation of research centres and institutes. As a result, this tool may well increase compliance rates. MTA has created an OA fund to cover for APCs that started operating in the end of 2013. In line with other European OA funds, APCs for articles published in Open Access journals are eligible for refund by MTA but OA charges in hybrid journals are not. Another possible funding source for APCs is the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, which earmarks 1/8th of the project budget overheads for supporting Open Access. Furthermore, Hungary participates in SCOAP3 that seeks to promote access to journals in high energy physics at no cost for authors. More recently, MTA has agreed with Elsevier the conditions of repository deposit. The possibilities of negotiating prepaid OA plans with major publishers will be explored. The MTA Committee on Publishing Scientific Books and Journals has recently decided to require open access for supported publications by requesting mandatory deposit in REAL. Different embargo periods are acceptable for deposits: one year for individual journal articles, two years for full issues or volumes, and up to eight years for books. However, publishers may apply for exemptions (closed access deposit). If the publication is accessible immediately, repositories other than REAL can also be used. For publication grants awarded from 2015, OTKA also requires OA for book publishing grants. See PASTEUR4OA Hungarian National Case Study for more information on the Hungarian OA landscape."