Alternative Economic Designs for Academic Publishing
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Description
Prices of for-profit academic journals have increased extremely rapidly over the past two decades. This has troubled librarians and researchers who are concerned about the dissemination of knowledge. It has also led to tension between for-profit publishers and the academic community that provides those publishers with free labor. Economists who study academic journal pricing have considered alternative explanations for the growth in journal prices. McCabe suggests that increased concentration in the journal industry is a contributor to this growth. Nevo, Rubinfeld and McCabe attribute at least part of the rapid price increases to the increasing sophistication of for-profit publishers, who have learned that they can extract large rents from academic libraries, whose demands for journals are remarkably price inelastic. Edlin and Rubinfeld emphasize the relatively recent effort by major publishers to bundle print and electronic journals. Whatever the explanation, the high cost of academic journal is a pressing problem for university libraries and university budgets. This paper focuses on the policy issues that flow from the reality of high for-profit journal prices. We being by looking more deeply into the source of the inelasticity of library demands and the higher for-profit prices that result. We suggest that a key to understanding the pricing of journals under various policy regimes is to understand the two-sided markets that drive journal pricing. We follow with a discussion of alternative models for academic publishing and some remarks about how libraries and universities may cope with this problem.
Source Publication
Working within the Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Innovation Policy for the Knowledge Society
Source Editors/Authors
Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, Harry First, Diane L. Zimmerman
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Bergstrom, Theodore C. and Rubinfeld, Daniel L., "Alternative Economic Designs for Academic Publishing" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 1826.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1826
