Rock around the clock? Exploring scholars' downloading patterns

In the context of the current "publish or perish" culture of academe, scholars' working habits and work-life balance issues have become a subject of interest. The aim of this paper is to examine scholars' downloading patterns on four different timescales: daily, weekly, monthly and by season. Our analyses are based on the web log data of Erudit, the main journal diffusion platform of French-Canadian journals in the social sciences and humanities. We used a stratified random sample of 70 days of log files (total of 1,407,163 downloads) from 2011 to 2015. We focus on the countries with the highest number of downloads: Canada, France and the United States. Results show that Canadian and French users perform the large majority of their downloads during weekdays. Americans' online activity, however, is steadier across the day (and night) and during weekends. Canadian users' download activity increases at the middle of semesters, probably due to the high number of undergraduates using Erudit.