Factors determining subscription prices of scholarly journals in business discipline: Themes and variations

Abstract

This empirical study investigates factors that affect subscription prices of business journals. The hypotheses are that a number of factors affect journal subscription prices including types of publishers, features of publications, and locations of publications. While some regression results are consistent with the main theoretical themes of previous studies, others show variations. First, it was found that journals with advertisement tend to have lower subscription prices than those without advertisement. None of previous studies found this variable statistically significant. Second, annual subscription prices of business journals published in the U.K. are substantially higher than those published in the U.S. while the coefficients of journals published in Europe were not statistically significant. Third, no evidence was found that journals with larger circulations have lower subscription prices. This study concludes that to examine factors affecting subscription prices, one needs to focus on journals by discipline since determinants of journal prices vary from discipline to discipline. D

The High Cost of Science Journals: A Case Study and Discussion

“…This contrasts earlier findings for science journals (Chressanthis & Chressanthis, 1994;Tenopir & King, 1997;Bergstrom, 2001;Frazier, 2001;Bergstrom & Bergstrom, 2004;Taylor et al, 2008) and similar findings for business journals (Liu 2005(Liu , 2011. In some studies, commercially published journals were more than ten times the average price of nonprofit titles (Edlin & Rubinfeld, 2004).…”

“…It has been argued for some years that open access publishing has the potential to change the 'market dysfunction' under which the price of information resources needed by faculty and students far exceeds library budgets (Johnson, 2004;Liu, 2005). However, Henderson & Bosch (2010) argue that OA initiatives have had little effect on the publishing industry, and that OA journals are not yet considered 'mainstream' publishing venues.…”

The Prices of Open Access Publishing: The Composition of APC across Different Fields of Sciences

“…Both the prestige of the publication outlet and the number of citations of one's work are important career mechanisms in science. Most of prestigious journals delivering high reputation are incumbent outlets, having been in the market long before the OA movement started, because reputation-building takes time (Suber, 2002;Liu, 2005). As a consequence, the more prestigious journals are usually paid-hybrid-OA -and the more expensive ones as former studies found reputation to be a driving-factor for APC (Solomon & Björk, 2012a;Solomon & Björk, 2012b;Wang, et al, 2015;Pinfield, et al, 2017;Schönfelder, 2018).…”

Introduction

“…While almost all the researchers using either the cost-accounting approach or the regression approach concluded that commercial publishers overcharged libraries (e.g., Economic Consulting Services Inc. 1989;Petersen 1989Petersen , 1990Petersen , 1992Chressanthis and Chressanthis 1994;Tenopir and King 1997;Liu 2005Liu , 2011Liu and Gee 2017), the findings from some case studies using small sample sizes and arithmetic calculations were inconclusive (e.g., Creaser and White 2008;Rose-Wiles 2011). One study with flawed statistical modeling came to the opposite conclusion.…”