The pricing of academic journals: A two-sided market perspective

Doh-Shin Jeon and Jean Rochet

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal’s quality standard. If the journal’s objective was to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal as long as the positive externalities generated by its diffusion exceed the marginal cost of distribution. However, we show that if an open access journal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers’ payoffs, the impact of the journal or its profit), it tends to choose a quality standard below the socially efficient level.

Keywords: Academic Journals; Open-Access; Reader-Pays; Two-Sided Market; Endogenous Quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 L44 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03, Revised 2009-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-mic, nep-net and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1025.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective (2010)
Working Paper: The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective (2009)
Working Paper: The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).