Open access for local studies?

"Just over a year ago at the University of Leicester Library, we were looking at the download stats for our online PhD theses and noticed that a study of the village of Wrangle in the early modern period was the most downloaded item that month. This got us thinking. Of all the open access theses and research publications in our online archive what is actually popular with users? Medicine and health related items do well, presumably from people searching for information on illnesses and conditions. The other studies that consistently attract downloads are those about a particular place. Broadly speaking these are from geography, archaeology and history. Open access policy has been driven by the sciences and has tended to assume that freely available publications are an unproblematic ‘good thing’. It has paid less attention to what is popular, with whom and why."