Historia Contemporanea

About Historia Contemporanea

Historia Contemporánea — Journal Profile

Historia Contemporánea is a Spanish academic journal of contemporary history published by UPV/EHU Press, the publishing service of the University of the Basque Country, at Leioa in the province of Bizkaia, Spain. Its print ISSN is 1130-2402 and its electronic ISSN is 2340-0277, the pair recorded on this JournalsWorld record, confirmed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and used by the journal's own site on the university's journal platform. It is a fully open-access journal — the Directory records its open-access start as 1988 — publishing original research in Spanish and English on contemporary history in its different branches and methodologies, together with monographic dossiers and reviews of books in the speciality. The journal's own description, on the University of the Basque Country's journal platform, calls it an academic journal appearing every four months, built on original research work; its editorial board runs a documented double-blind review process with external referees, and its articles appear under Creative Commons licences, typically CC BY. For historians of modern Spain — and of the contemporary world more widely — it is one of the established Spanish-language venues, anchored in a university history department with a strong contemporary-history research community of its own.

Identity and setting

A journal's title can mislead, and this one needs its context. Spain has several periodicals with similar names — Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea from the Complutense University of Madrid, and Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea from the University of Salamanca among them — and the Basque journal is a distinct title from both, with its own ISSN pair, its own publisher and its own editorial line. Historia Contemporánea belongs to the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea), whose contemporary history department is home to research groups working on the modern history of the Basque Country and Spain — on gender and subjectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the history of emotions, on memory, on nationalism and on the Spanish Civil War and the transition to democracy, among other themes. The journal is the outward-facing periodical of that scholarly environment, but it is not a house journal in the narrow sense: its remit, stated on its own platform, takes in contemporary history in all its branches and methodologies, its dossiers gather authors from many universities, and its book review pages cover the speciality's literature broadly. Published from the university's Leioa campus in Bizkaia, it writes from Spain's north coast to a readership that spans the Spanish-speaking historical world and, through its English-language articles and abstracts, the wider European community of contemporary historians.

The journal's open-access character is long-standing rather than a recent conversion. The Directory of Open Access Journals records its open-access start as 1988 and lists it with the features that mark a mature open journal: a stated licence (Creative Commons, with CC BY recorded in DOAJ and described by the journal as typical), a preservation arrangement through LOCKSS, a plagiarism-checking step in its workflow, and no charges of any kind to authors. Research funded by the public should be freely available to the public, the journal's own open-access statement argues, because free availability stimulates the wider circulation of knowledge — a principle it applies by giving readers immediate, unrestricted access to full texts, with the rights to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link them. In a field where many established journals still sit behind subscription walls, a decades-old history journal that has organised itself this way is a significant piece of infrastructure for Spanish and Latin American scholarship in particular, where library budgets for foreign subscriptions are tight and open Spanish-language venues carry real weight.

Scope and subjects

The journal's declared focus is contemporary history — in the Spanish academic convention, the period running from the late eighteenth century to the present — studied in its different branches and with its different methodologies. Its DOAJ keyword set names the territory plainly: contemporary history, the twentieth century, politics, economics, culture and methodology. OpenAlex's topic profile of its contents adds the geography: the largest clusters concern Spanish history and politics, the historical and socio-economic study of Spain and related regions, Spanish culture and identity, European political history and Basque language and culture studies. Within that frame, the journal's pages carry political history, including the history of nationalism, of the Civil War, of Francoism and of the democratic transition; social and economic history; cultural history; the history of gender, of emotions and of everyday life; historical demography; memory studies; and methodological and historiographical reflection on how contemporary history is written. Its monographic dossiers — themed groups of articles on a single problem — are a regular structural feature, and its review section notices new books in the speciality, keeping the journal in the discipline's running conversation about its own recent literature.

Languages matter to fit. The journal publishes in Spanish and English, and DOAJ records exactly those two languages. A paper in Spanish will find the journal's core readership directly; a paper in English reaches the same editors and referees and gains the wider European audience the language brings. What the journal does not publish is work outside contemporary history's period and questions: modernists of earlier centuries, and scholars of antiquity or the medieval world, have their own neighbouring venues — several of them in the same university's journal family — and political scientists or sociologists whose work has no historical dimension will find the fit strained even when their subject is the present day. The contemporary past, approached historically, is the journal's ground.

Editorial process in detail

Few journals describe their review machinery as openly as this one does on its own platform, and the detail is worth recording because authors can plan around it. Submissions first pass a preliminary review by the editorial board, which the journal says takes a maximum of one month from receipt; papers that do not fit the journal's content or presentation requirements can be declined at this stage. Papers that pass go to external referees under a double-blind system — anonymous in both directions — with at least two referees per manuscript, using the journal's report form; referees may not be members of the journal's own editorial board. The board then decides, within a maximum of six months from receipt, in light of the reports, and the author receives a reasoned response — acceptance, required modifications or rejection — with the referees' reports always attached. Where modifications are required, publication depends on their being incorporated in a revised version. The final decision rests with the editorial board in all cases, and the list of external referees is published every two years in the journal's last issue of the cycle, with thanks for their work. The Directory of Open Access Journals independently records the process as double anonymous peer review and gives a publication time of twenty weeks — the same picture, from the other side. The journal also maintains a code of good practice addressing the ethics of its editorial work, its relations with authors and referees and the handling of misconduct, framed by the international work of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and its workflow includes plagiarism screening, as DOAJ's record confirms.

Metrics and standing

As with every profile in this series, each figure is attributed to its source. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint to source S4210230899, recorded at the time of checking 1,430 works and 2,682 citations, with a summary h-index of 17, an i10-index of 46 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.20. Its yearly counts show a journal publishing at a steady rhythm of roughly fifty works a year in recent years, all of them open access in OpenAlex's indexing — exactly what a four-monthly open journal of articles and reviews would produce. The SCImago-based data behind the earlier JournalsWorld record listed an h-index of 12 and a best quartile of Q2 in History. Contemporary history is a book-centred, nationally anchored field in which citation accumulates slowly and much influence travels through reviews, syllabuses and historiographical debate rather than through journal citations alone; the journal's Q2 standing in its Scopus category, its decades-long run and its place in the Spanish historical community's own infrastructure say more about its real position than any single number. Authors should also weigh the discovery value of full open access with DOAJ listing: every article is freely readable everywhere from the day it appears, which for scholars writing for Latin American and Spanish readers is often worth more than a quartile point.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's site on the University of the Basque Country's journal platform, where its author instructions, copyright notice and submission workflow are published. Preparing a manuscript with the journal's documented process in mind will smooth its passage. Write in Spanish or English; give the text the full scholarly apparatus the journal's platform requires, including title, abstract and keywords in the forms its instructions set out; anonymise the manuscript properly for double-blind review, since the journal's system depends on anonymity in both directions; and expect the documented timetable — a preliminary editorial judgement within about a month, and a final decision within about six months — when planning around thesis, grant or hiring deadlines. There is no article processing charge and no other charge, as DOAJ records; the journal's articles are published under Creative Commons licences, typically CC BY, and DOAJ's record notes that authors do not retain copyright under its standard terms as recorded there — authors with funder requirements about rights should read the journal's current copyright notice before submitting. Scholars interested in proposing a monographic dossier should approach the editorial board through the journal's platform contact route, since dossiers are a planned feature of the journal rather than an accident of submissions; book reviews are likewise arranged within the journal's editorial process, and its review pages are a good first contribution for younger scholars entering the field.

The Basque dimension — and the wider field

A university journal always bears the mark of its home, and readers of Historia Contemporánea will find the Basque Country well represented in its pages and its dossiers: the history of Basque nationalism, of industrialisation and its social worlds in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, of the Civil War and Francoism in the Basque provinces, of the democratic transition and the long aftermath of political violence are subjects on which the journal's home department holds deep expertise, and its pages are a natural place to follow that scholarship. It would be a mistake, though, to read the journal as merely regional. Its dossiers and articles range across Spain as a whole — the Restoration, the Second Republic, the Civil War, the dictatorship, the transition and the democratic decades are the shared backbone of Spanish contemporary history, and the journal treats them as such — and beyond Spain to Europe and the wider world where the questions are contemporary-historical. The research environment behind it includes groups known for work on gender, emotions and subjectivity in modern Spain, and those methodological signatures — oral history, the history of experience, attention to discourse and the body — recur in the journal's contents and set its flavour apart from more institutionally minded Spanish history journals. For a doctoral student mapping where a new project might be published, a year's issues offer a fair sample: Spanish-focused and Basque-focused work, methodological essays, a dossier working a single theme hard, and a review section that shows which books the field is reading.

For readers and libraries

For readers, the journal's model is simple to use: everything is on the university platform, free, in full text, with the archive organised by issue and the newest work appearing in its current-issue and online-first areas. For libraries, its bibliographic identity is stable and well documented — print and electronic ISSNs, a DOAJ record with licence and preservation information, LOCKSS archiving and article DOIs recorded in DOAJ — which makes it an easy title to catalogue and to keep. Teachers of Spanish history will find its dossiers particularly usable: a dossier gathers a set of research articles around one theme in a form that can anchor a seminar's reading, and because access is open, students can be sent to the texts directly without subscription barriers — a practical virtue that subscription journals cannot match, and one reason open journals of this vintage have become load-bearing parts of the teaching infrastructure in their fields.

Related journals

Historians of contemporary Spain comparing venues will usually consider a known set. Ayer, the journal of the Spanish association of contemporary historians, is the field's other major general Spanish venue. Hispania, from the CSIC, covers Spanish history across all periods. The similarly named Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea (Complutense University of Madrid) and Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea (University of Salamanca) are distinct journals with their own ISSNs and lines, not editions of this one. Historia y Política and Historia del Presente serve neighbouring parts of the territory. Among these, the Basque journal's combination — full open access with no charges, a published and prompt review timetable, dossiers and reviews alongside articles, and a base in one of Spain's most productive contemporary-history departments — gives it a clear identity, and its openness makes it a first port of call for authors who need their work read in the Spanish-speaking world without a paywall in the way.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Historia Contemporánea?

Its print ISSN is 1130-2402 and its electronic ISSN is 2340-0277, as recorded in DOAJ and on the journal's own platform.

Who publishes Historia Contemporánea?

UPV/EHU Press, the publishing service of the University of the Basque Country in Spain; the journal sits on the university's journal platform and is rooted in its contemporary history community.

Is Historia Contemporánea open access? Does it charge authors?

Yes, it is fully open access — DOAJ records its open-access start as 1988 and its licence as Creative Commons (typically CC BY, per the journal). It charges no article processing charge and no other charges, per DOAJ.

How does its peer review work?

By double-blind external review: an editorial pre-check within a maximum of one month, then at least two external referees, with a final board decision within a maximum of six months and referees' reports always shared with the author, as the journal itself describes.

In what languages can I submit?

Spanish and English, the journal's two publication languages as recorded in DOAJ and on its platform.

Is it the same journal as Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea or Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea?

No. Those are separate journals from Madrid and Salamanca with different ISSNs; Historia Contemporánea is the University of the Basque Country's journal, with ISSNs 1130-2402 and 2340-0277.

What do its citation metrics look like?

OpenAlex (source S4210230899, at checking) recorded 1,430 works, 2,682 citations and an h-index of 17; SCImago-based data listed an h-index of 12 and a best quartile of Q2 in History. Each figure is attributed to its source.

Sources consulted for this profile: the journal's pages on the University of the Basque Country journal platform (focus and scope, peer-review description, open-access policy, good-practice code); DOAJ record via the search API (licence CC BY, no APC, double anonymous review, LOCKSS, languages ES/EN, publication time 20 weeks, OA start 1988, publisher UPV/EHU Press); OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint (S4210230899); SCImago data as carried in the earlier record. Figures are stated as at the time of checking.