Free Labor for Costly Journals?

Abstract

There is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses. This price difference does not reflect a difference in quality. The six most-cited economics journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about $180 per year. Only five of the twenty most-cited journals are owned by commercial publishers, and the average price of these five journals is about $1660 per year. Tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost-effectiveness for the ten most-cited nonprofit journals and the ten most-cited journals owned by commercial presses. The average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about about sixteen times times as high as for the nonprofit journals.

Evolution of social norms with heterogeneous preferences: A general model and an application to the academic review process

“…A few studies considered the pricing of academic journals (e.g. Bergstrom, 2001 andMcCabe, 2002), while others focused on various aspects of the review process, for example payment to referees (Engers and Gans, 1998;Chang and Lai, 2001), the value-added from the review process (Laband, 1990), and the increase in the number and the extent of revisions requested prior to publication, which also increases the submit-accept time (Ellison, 2002a;2002b). This trend is an acknowledgement that research on the academic review process is not only interesting, but is also very important, because knowing more about the process and understanding it better may suggest how it can be improved, enhancing the productivity of economists and scholars in other disciplines.…”

Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing

“…19 The upsurge, however, can vary widely by discipline. Take economics, for example, where the total number of English-language journals increased tenfold between 1960 and 2000, 20 and the doubling occurred on average around every 12.5 years.…”

Besonderheiten und Wettbewerbsprobleme des Marktes für wissenschaftliche Fachzeitschriften

“…Rochet und Tirole 2003a, 2003b, ist jedoch klar, dass sich beim Vorliegen von Netzeffekten leicht eine quasimonopolistische Preispolitik herausbilden kann. Bergstrom (2001) führt in diesem Zusammenhang die Erkenntnisse des aus der Spieltheorie bekannten Koordinationsspiels als Begründung für die vom Konkurrenzmarktgleichgewicht abweichende Preissetzung kommerzieller Anbieter an. Die zentrale Erkenntnis lautet: Die Reputation von akademischen Journalen hängt weniger von durch die Zeitschrift selbst determinierten Faktoren ab (wie dem Zeitschriftentitel oder der Auswahl der Gutachter und Herausgeber) noch bieten hoch bepreiste kommerzielle Journale eine bessere "Servicequalität" als nichtkommerzielle Zeitschriften.…”