When Paywall Goes AWOL: The Demand for Open Access Education Research

Seth Gershenson, Morgan S. Polikoff (polikoff@usc.edu) and Rui Wang (rw3515a@american.edu)
Additional contact information
Morgan S. Polikoff: University of Southern California
Rui Wang: American University

No 12158, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: As universities cut library funding and forego expensive journal subscriptions, many academic organizations and researchers, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), are moving towards open-access publications that are freely downloadable by anyone with a working internet connection. However, the impact of paywalls on the consumption of academic articles is unclear. We provide novel evidence on this question by exploiting a natural experiment in which six high-impact, usually gated AERA journals became open access for a two-month period in 2017. Using monthly download data, and an always-open access journal as a control group, we show that making journals open access increased article downloads in those journals by 60 to 80% per month. Given a per-article download price of $36, this suggests a download elasticity of about 0.3 to 0.4.

Keywords: academic journal; open access (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L17 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
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Forthcoming - published in: Educational Researcher, 2020, 49(4): 254-261.

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