The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective

Abstract

More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal's quality standard. If the journal's objective was to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal as long as the positive externalities generated by its diffusion exceed the marginal cost of distribution. However, we show that if an open access journal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers' utility, the impact of the journal or its profit), it tends to choose a quality standard below the socially efficient level.

Open Access as a Crude Solution to a Hold‐Up Problem in the Two‐Sided Market for Academic Journals

“…Another contribution is that we embrace all the intricacies of the two-sidedmarket model. McCabe and Snyder [2005] and Jeon and Rochet [2010] abstract from deadweight loss on the author side two-sided-market model by assuming homogeneous authors, biasing the welfare calculation in favor of open access. McCabe and Snyder [2007] assume authors are charged a per-reader submission fee.…”

“…,McCabe and Snyder [2007] andJeon and Rochet [2010]. Armstrong 7 The competitive bottleneck can arise in the absence of the commitment problem, but only if authors care little about journal readership, say because citers can access the article through other channels.…”

Collection Sales: Good or Bad for Journals?

“…Thus, a journal's ultimate aim may be to publish the ''best papers,'' and one way to attract the best papers is to have a wide readership. See Jeon and Rochet (2007) for more detailed discussion about how journal pricing (both to institutions and to submitting authors) and the quality of articles interact. Dewatripont et al (2007) for more recent data for a wider range of scientific disciplines, which also show that for-profit journals typically are significantly more expensive than nonprofit journals.…”

“…16. See McCabe and Snyder (2005) and Jeon and Rochet (2007) for further discussion of this point. Armstrong (2006) for more details on this ''competitive bottleneck '' story, and McCabe and Snyder (2006) for the application of related ideas to the journal market.…”

Fear of Rejection? Tiered Certification and Transparency

“…The recent advocacy in favor of open access publishing (charging authors through submission and/or publication fees, rather than readers) may accelerate this unbundling. An interesting literature (e.g., McCabe and Snyder, 2005, 2007and Jeon and Rochet, 2010) analyzes certification from the point of view of two-sided markets theory. In particular, it looks at when academic journals should charge readers or authors, and how the quality of certification is affected by this choice.…”