As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m interested in exploring historians’ views of open access, Gold and Green, and exploring therefore their behavior with the Green OA options they currently have, principally institutional repositories, and it seems likely to me that the best-case scenario for IR deposit are articles for which the publisher’s PDF is allowed, which seem so far to be in about 70 journals from about six different university presses.

To allow for a good range of journals, embargoes, and subject matter while sticking generally with history topics, I’ve changed somewhat and expanded the journals I’m looking at, dropping one of my initial three and adding another seven. The nine I’m now looking in for relevant articles are:

• American Quarterly Journal of Women’s History from Johns Hopkins University Press
• Pacific Historical Review from University of California Press
• Public Historian from University of California Press
• Journal of Interdisciplinary History from MIT Press
• New England Quarterly from MIT Press
• Journal of World History from University of Hawaii Press
• Journal of Modern History from University of Chicago Press
• Journal of the Early Republic from University of Pennsylvania Press
• Early American Studies from University of Pennsylvania Press

From those nine, I’m trying to gather up the title, issue, and author for most research articles and long essays for a couple of years and note also the authors’ institutions. (I’m not interested right now in book reviews or in editorials, letters, editors’ notes, or other items of under five pages.) I’m starting with articles published in 2013, since none of these journals have an embargo of longer than 12 months, so 2013 is the earliest full year unaffected by an embargo for all of these. I’ll probably also look at 2011 and 2012.

Once I know which articles I’m looking for and with which institutions their authors are affiliated, I can look at what proportion of authors who could deposit the version of record in their IR have chosen to do.

At the moment, I’m tracking all this information in a Google spreadsheet.

Who knows whether I’ll finish all of this or whether it’s actually worthwhile, but right now it at least seems like it could be pretty interesting.