Description
Next to Sci-Hub, The Cost of Knowledge is the second top-cited movement on online articles, which is why it’s worth focusing on. Publisher’s profits in business contributed to the rise of boycott movements. The most influent and discussed one, as it is possible to notice from question 7, is “The Cost of Knowledge”. This organization was born in 2012 to oppose Elsevier, the renown publisher which is the leader in scientific publishing market. Subscribers are asked to agree or disagree to three boycott issues: not refereeing, not editing and not publishing on Elsevier anymore. The petition signers have been mapped on Carto to analyze their distribution and understand possible connections. The majority of people who subscribed live in USA and in Europe. For each country, we displayed the H index, which is a value that indicates the quality of scientific research. There is a clear correlation between countries with high research values and concentration of the petition’s signers.
In addition, these people, who are mostly researchers and professors, were clustered by university of origin. We created a circular visualization where each radius stands for one of the 30 universities with more subscribers. Each one provides information about the number of signers, the percentage on total number of professors, the research value, the financial fundings received per year, and eventually the affiliation with activists or movements among the actors.
It is clear that the controversy includes some influent epicenters, which are the most important university of the word. Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are all catalysts for activities related to free access to knowledge.
Generally, the tendency to go open is more remarkable in contexts where research quality is extremely high, which underlines the will of good researchers to share their results with other people.
