The Faustian Grip of Academic Publishing

Robert Parks

Microeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The journal acquisition budget of libraries is not increasing at the same rate as subscription rates creating the serials' crisis. Many solutions have been proposed including the freely available electronic journal. However, all the solutions suffer the same Faustian Grip - namely that the actors in the academic publishing game have little or no incentive to stop publishing in the current journals. We examine those incentives concluding that even with a better more efficient technology, the actors will not change from the current academic publishing institution, and the serials' crisis will remain.

Keywords: serials; crisis; journal; pricing; academic; publishing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2002-02-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
Note: Type of Document - Adobe pdf; prepared on Win 95; to print on HP; pages: 17 ; figures: included
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Faustian grip of academic publishing (2001)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:0202005

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