Academic copyright in the publishing game: a contest perspective

Eberhard Feess () and Marc Scheufen ()
Additional contact information
Marc Scheufen: Ruhr University of Bochum (RUB)

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2016, vol. 42, issue 2, No 4, 263-294

Abstract: Abstract As scientists are motivated by readership rather than by royalties, one might doubt that academic copyright is required for stimulating research. Consequently, establishing an open access regime is currently intensively being discussed. We contribute to the literature by using a contest-model in which differently talented researchers compete for limited journals space. The contest perspective adds a rent-seeking motive into the publishing game which questions that private incentives for research are always too low due to the positive externalities of scientific progress. In our model, open access always leads to higher social welfare when incentives are too high. When incentives are too low, then open access is only superior if the benefits from larger readership is sufficiently high.

Keywords: Open access; Copyright; Cultural economics; Economics of science; Publishing game; Tullock contest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K11 K29 L17 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-016-9528-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:kap:ejlwec:v:42:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s10657-016-9528-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-016-9528-1

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().