Open Access in der ungarischen Archäologie – Notwendigkeit oder Chance?

Abstract

While Open Access (OA) plays an increasing role in German archaeology, the free accessibility to publications is neglected in Hungary. On the one side the government, scientific institutes and funders demand OA publications from the scientists. On the other side this caused a passiveness to OA among the scientists: A large number of them is not willing to spend time on preparing their publications „ready for press”, if they will be only published online. This seems to be a reaction on the imposed publication in OA, while there is no educational initiation on the topic. Therefore most of the publications are stored in institutional repositories instead of being published in OA journals. At the same time there is a strong necessity of free accessibility in Hungarian archaeology. Not only the smaller provincial museums but also the big museums and libraries in Budapest have no financial basis for the acquisition of new publications. So they started the Magyar Múzeumi Digitális Könyvtár (Hungarian Museums’ Digital Library). It is joined by the new OA journal Magyar Régészet (Hungarian archaeology) to make OA more popular in Hungarian archaeology.