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.