Pricing the serials library: in defence of a market economy

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that the origin of the unremitting price increases of academic journals is at the demand site of the serials market. Given that for each and every scientific article the publisher is monopolist, for which he may or may not charge the monopoly price, almost the only thing which can explain the upward trend in prices are changing elasticities of demand. It is suggested that the enormous increase of scientific publications in the aftermath of the institutionalisation of the publish or perish regime in combination with the library organisation at most universities precisely produces this result. Libraries are organised as a common pool and the real consumer hardly faces any budget constraint. When offering contracts for digital access, the publishers' strategy seems to be bundling and first degree price discrimination. Prices of the bundles will be determined in negotiations. Empowerment of the university negotiaters requires that they have some influence on the impact score of a bundle. The paper ends with a few suggestions of how extraordinarily expensive commercial publishers can be punished by redirecting the real consumers' web searches. These suggestions imply that the common pool character of the library is gradually given up.Library Organisation, Academic Publishing, Digital Access,

Price Discrimination in the Subscription Market for Economics Journals

“…The intuition behind this result could be the following. Recently faced with a tight, if not declining, budget, libraries tend to adopt a strategy that keeps indispensable journals, but cancels subscription to those considered only as interesting journals for economists (). The indispensable journals tend to be those with higher quality.…”

“…7 Dewatripont et al (2007) also use single journal prices in their study on journal prices. A single journal's price is still well correlated with the price for a bundle because publishers (e.g., Elsevier) often tie the price for a bundle to the libraries' historical willingness to pay (Plasmeijer 2002). In other words, pricing of bundles is often based on libraries' pre-existing single-journal subscriptions (Dewatripont et al 2007).…”

“…Journals can be viewed as monopolies in their products because a scientific article is unique in that it has no substitute . The transfer of copyright from authors to publishers forms the foundation of the publishers' market power (; ). As a result, many publishers (especially commercial publishers) have considerable monopoly power over subscribers, even for their second‐tier journals (; ).…”

An Auction Market for Journal Articles

“…13 A more accurate method multiplies citations of an 12 When publishers (both for-profit and non-profit) realized they could issue more journals without lowering prices-since journals are complements and not substitutes-the number of journals exploded from about 120 in 1980 to almost 300 in 2000 Plasmeijer 2002). EconLit lists over 1,100 at http://www.econlit.org/journal_list.html-using a more inclusive definition.…”

Open science in e‐science: contingency or policy?

“…This is a complex issue that remains unresolved, but has serious ramifications for the future impact of e‐Research both within and beyond current e‐Science development projects. The issues that openness in science raises have been discussed more generally in policies and initiatives around open science, such as the tension between IPR and the public domain in scientific communication (David, 2003), Open‐Source development, such as the relationship between proprietary and open source software (West, 2003), and Open Access, such as feasible economic models for the dissemination of publicly funded research (Plasmeijer, 2002)[2]. Openness of e‐Science has so far not been discussed in terms of research practice and governance from the perspective of individual projects.…”