An Auction Market for Journal Articles

Abstract

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement in equilibrium. Besides the benefit of speed, this mechanism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their effort. The "academic dollar" proceeds from papers sold at auction go to authors, editors and referees of cited articles. This nonpecuniary income indicates the academic impact of an article-facilitating decisions on tenure and promotion. This auction market does not require more work of editors.Keywords Academic journals · Academic productivity · Market design JEL Classification A11 · D02 · D44The Manuscript Clearing House . . . would reduce the social cost of information to editors, authors and the subscribing public thereby generating considerable efficiency in the production and consumption of scholarly output. By promoting competitive bidding for manuscripts, it would equalize returns to scholarly output across ranks, improve the efficiency of the academic job market and tend to reduce alleged discrimination by journals. [. . . ] Editors would have far more information about the papers available on the market, reducing duplication in publication, double reviewing and delay in collating related papers.- Havrilesky (1975) Many academics wish the Current Publishing System (CPS) worked better (Ellison 2002a(Ellison , 2002bColander and Plum 2004), and the need to reform is growing as pressure from different sources increases. Junior academics need a working system to validate their academic production; senior academics may abandon a dysfunctional one (Oswald 2006;Ellison 2007 Tsang and Frey (2006) suggest an "As-Is Review," i.e., editors accept or reject based on referee comments, but authors choose which revisions to make. Each of these ideas fails to address the main problem: Giving adequate incentives to referees who must expend effort to understand a paper well enough to improve it.We propose auctions-with revenue sharing-to fix incentives. Although we worked out "our" auction idea before discovering Havrilesky's article cited above, we are pleased to find this precedent. Our version of a competitive market differs from Havrilesky's in its treatment of currency (we do not use cash), payments (authors, editors and referees of cited articles are paid; not the author of the auctioned paper), and the formalized treatment of incentives (see the Appendix). We are also presenting this idea at a time of unprecedented pressure on authors (for publication) and journals (for audience), a time when change is a relatively attractive option.The Auction Market for Journal Articles (AMJA) works as follows: In period zero, the author writes, markets and submits his paper to the AMJA auction server. In period one, editors screen and value papers. In period two, editors bid for papers. Winning bids-in "academic dollars" or A$-go to the authors, editors and referees of articles cited in auctioned papers. In period three, referees revi...

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