Self-archiving practice and the influence of publisher policies in the social sciences

Authors in different disciplines exhibit very different behaviours on the so-called ‘green’ road to open access, i.e. self-archiving. This study looks at the self-archiving behaviour of authors publishing in leading journals in six social science disciplines. It tests the hypothesis that authors are self-archiving according to the norms of their respective disciplines rather than following self-archiving policies of publishers, and that, as a result, they are self-archiving significant numbers of publisher PDF versions. It finds significant levels of self-archiving, as well as significant self-archiving of the publisher PDF version, in all the disciplines investigated. Publishers’ self-archiving policies have no influence on author self-archiving practice