Pricing of Scientific Journals and Market Power

Abstract

We analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices, their quality measured by their citation counts, their age, as well as conduct of publishers. The database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003. We show that (a) for-profit journals charge roughly 3 times more than journals run by scientific societies; (b) the number of citations has a positive impact on prices; (c) there are large differences in prices across fields that vary from 1 and 6; these are highly (and positively) correlated with the degree of concentration in the industry. * This paper revisits Section 3 of Dewatripont et al. (2006), and extends the results showing that publishers' concentration in a scientific field has an impact on prices. We are grateful to Estelle Cantillon and Françoise Vandooren for comments on previous versions.

Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road

“…In a broad and detailed econometric study of the pricing practices of social science and natural science journals, Dewatripont et al (2007) draw three conclusions. First, for-profit publishers charge roughly four times more than not-for-profit publishers.…”

“…What has been characterised as rampant price inflation is one characteristic of the market in academic journals -or at least those journals published by commercial publishers -with several studies since 2000 indicating rapidly increasing prices charged by for-profit publishers (Bergstrom, 2001;Bergstrom and Bergstrom, 2004;Dewatripont et al, 2007;Harvie et al, 2012). Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2004) suggest that a journal page published by a for-profit publisher is between three and five times more expensive than one published by a not-for-profit publisher.…”

“…One factor driving increasing prices is journal reputation (Bergstrom, 2001) -but this leads to increasing profit margins (McCabe, 2004). In short, widely-cited journals are perceived to be higher quality, which allows for-profit publishers to charge higher prices for such journals; if widely-cited and more highly-priced journals also enjoy higher circulation (because they are widely-cited), then publishers also benefit through lower average production costs (McCabe, 2004;Dewatripont et al, 2007).…”

Evaluating big deal journal bundles

“…Dewatripont et al (4) found that the average listed price of for-profit journals was four times as high as that of nonprofit journals when controlling for age, number of citations, number of articles, language, and discipline. The web site journalprices.com (5) reports that in 2011, on average, subscription prices per article or per citation of forprofit publishers are about three times as high as those charged by nonprofit journals in the same academic disciplines.…”

Whether big deals are really big for engineering college libraries?

“…Users prefer to use the electronic form of journals rather than print (Dhingra and Mahajan, 2007) (Sathe et al, 2002). Another study reveals that "the journal prices tend to be higher in scientific fields where publishers are more concentrated" (Dewatripont et al, 2007). An earlier study shows that publishers were increasing their price of journals 5-10 per cent annually [3].…”