La R\'evolution D\'evore ses Enfants: Pricing Implications of Transformative Agreements

Wolfgang Schmal

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: With the widespread dissemination of the internet, academia envisioned free availability and rapid dissemination of new knowledge. However, most researchers continued publishing in established journals instead of switching to fully open-access alternatives. That preserved the market power of the large commercial publishing houses owning thousands of journals behind paywalls. To turn these portfolios into open access, research institutions around the globe have been negotiating `transformative agreements:' Papers are published fully open access, and universities pay only for the publication but not for subscriptions any longer. In this paper, I demonstrate that publishers controlling a large stock of paywalled publications can use them as leverage to ensure high revenues even with decreasing publication numbers. By that, this industrial policy may harm competitors that only publish under open access. This could harm competition and perpetuate the position of the incumbent players.

Date: 2024-03, Revised 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.03597 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2403.03597

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().