The “Cost of Knowledge” boycott trajectory

“The “Cost of Knowledge” boycott of Elsevier is in its seventh week. The boycott was precipitated by various practices of the journal publisher, most recently its support for the Research Works Act, a bill that would roll back the NIH public access policy and prevent similar policies by other federal funding agencies. Early on, several hundred researchers a day were signing on to the pledge not to submit to or edit or review for Elsevier journals, but recently that rate had settled down to about a hundred per day. On February 11, I started tracking the daily totals by scraping the site through a simple scraper I set up at ScraperWiki. I’ve graphed the results in the attached graph, showing raw count of signatories with the blue line (left axis) and the number added since the previous day with the green bars (right axis). As you can see from the chart, there seems to be a slight drop in activity around weekends, and Sunday February 26 and Monday February 27 had clearly been the slowest days since I’ve been keeping records, and likely since the effort started. On the 27th (red arrow), Elsevier issued its quasi-recantation of support for RWA... The day after Elsevier’s announcement saw a bit of a bump back to previous levels. Was this an instance of the Streisand effect or was the 26-27 dip an aberration? It’s hard to tell. However, since the 27th, it seems clear that the number of pledges is down considerably. It could well be that Elsevier’s tactical approach has worked and it has stanched the spate of boycott pledges, despite the fact that the community was generally unimpressed with Elsevier’s statement, as Peter Suber has cataloged. Alternatively, the current rate of new pledges may just reflect the natural reductions that had been happening over the last few weeks. Elsevier has not changed its underlying stance. It still “continue[s] to oppose government mandates” for public access, as per RWA. It strongly opposes FRPAA. Have scientists lost interest again?”