The Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ) and Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Letter of Intent, as they move towards finalizing a new innovative pilot agreement for research access and Open Access publishing in Hungary.

"After months of struggle between Hungary’s research ministry and its scientific community, the nation’s parliament ratified a law on 2 July that gives the government control over the 40 or so institutes belonging to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences."

During the last couple of weeks, a myriad of support letters from individuals and institutions were delivered to the Secretariat of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Below is a list of these, which we will keep updating continuously. The Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Learned Society of Wales are the latest institutions to offer their support.

“With regard to the serious concerns, should parliament decide to adopt the bill, the MTA’s initiation of a constitutional review would be inevitable.” The MTA Governing Board convened on 12 June 2019. Following is their unanimous resolution.

In the frame of this programme, which aims to foster the global competitiveness of research groups operating in Hungary, further seven Guest Scientists can take part in the work of the research centres and research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The Tree of Life (ToL) has been of central importance in the biological sciences, usually understood as a model or a metaphor, and portrayed in various graphical forms to summarize the history of life as a single diagram. If it is seen as a mathematical construct—a rooted graph theoretical tree or, as more recently viewed, a directed network [Network of Life (NoL)]—then its proper visualization is not feasible, for both epistemological and technical reasons.

François Mernier: "We were extremely lucky to have found these two galaxy clusters at this very rare stage of collision. It is also surprising to see such a beautiful agreement with the predictions of our computer simulations. However, we definitely need to find more clusters in similar pre-merging phases to better understand how the largest structures of the Universe have grown."

Members of parliament have voted in favour of the motion titled “The modification of particular laws necessary for the transformation of the institutional system and financing of the research, development and innovation system”. Consequently, the research network will be separated from the Academy. 131 MPs voted in favour, 53 against and 3 abstained.

58 professors from the Debrecen University and 30 professors from the Faculty of Science, at ELTE, Budapest have joined the solidarity statement published by the Szeged University earlier concerning the restructuring of the MTA. On Wednesday, 90 professors from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics urged the Parliament not to pass the bill concerning the Academy.

Researchers at the MTA Szeged Biological Research Centre (MTA BRC) developed a method to produce hydrogen more efficiently than before using green algae – in a laboratory at present. Several results of this research which has been ongoing since 2010 suggest that in the future it will be possible to produce hydrogen in an environmentally friendly way in the field or in greenhouses.