Alternative Economic Designs for Academic Publishing

1. Alternative Economic Designs for Academic Publishing Ted Bergstrom University of California Santa Barbara

2. Platform Competition in two-sided markets • A platform is an intermediary that plays an economically non-trivial role in interaction between producers and consumers. (Rochet and Tirole, 2003)

3. Examples of Platforms • Credit cards • Merchants and Consumers • Game Consoles • Game Developers and Players • Shopping malls • Merchants and Consumers • Academic Journals • Authors and Readers

4. Network externalities • Most interesting examples have economies of scale and network externalities to platforms. • Platforms have some market power.

5. Who do platforms collect from? • Mainly from suppliers • Credit cards (merchants) • Game consoles (game designers) • Shopping malls • Mainly from demanders • Academic Journals

6. What decides this? • Proposed explanation: Elasticity of demand. • Platforms load charges on side of platform that is least responsive to price.

7. Equilibrium for credit cards • Most merchants accept all major cards • Most customers do not carry all cards. • Customers have little need for more than one card and will use the card that is cheapest. • Merchants will lose sales if they don’t have all cards. Doesn’t pay to use only the cheapest card. • Price competition is intense on customer side, less so on merchant side. • Merchant demand more inelastic. Companies load cost onto merchants.

8. The Journal Platform • Publishing is valuable to authors. • Promotion, pay raises • Estimate—one citation worth $50 annual salary. • Reading journals is valuable to researchers. • Which side has more inelastic demand?

9. Why subscriber side has more inelastic demand • Scholars want to read all the journals in their area. An extra copy of a cheap journal is no substitute for an expensive journal. Scholar wants access to both. • Scholars don’t need to publish in all journals. With two equally good journals, publishing twice in the cheap one is about as good as once in cheap one, once in expensive one.

10. Two types of Journals,Non-profit and for profit • Both are important players.

11. Costs of a Complete Economics Journal Collection

12. Each type plays an important role • Non-profits supply most of the citations. • For-profits collect most of the money.

13. Market sustains these price differences on subscriber side.

14. Prices on author side of platform • Page charges in the sciences. • 7 top ecology journals are all non-profit and have author page charges $50-$150. • Less prestigious non-profits, lower page charges. (median $30). • For profits have no page charges. • Explanation: • Non-profits seek wide distribution. • For profits seek profit and so price on the inelastic side of market.

15. Perverse result with for-profits • Pricing on subscribers side of platform allows pricing far above average cost, plunders university budgets, and shuts out readers not at wealthy universities. • If pricing were only on the author side, the more elastic demand would force pricing close to average cost. Some deterrant effect for authors, but likely to be small.

16. Will technology crumble old pricing regime? • The Big Deal from commercial publishers • Bundling of electronic site licenses for publishers’ entire portfolio. • Price discrimination and library by library negotiation • So far they have managed to keep prices far above average cost.

17. Non-profit open access models • High-priced, high overhead: • PLOS in biology and medicine: Author fees $2000-$3000 • Low-priced, low overhead • Economics bulletin (zero charges) • Runs on donated labor and university overhead fumes • Theoretical economics • $100 submission fee. • Electronic Journal of Statistics • No charges or outside support • No copy-editing, papers submitted in TeX.

18. Hybrids, Commercial and non-profit • Authors of accepted papers can opt to pay an extra fee for paper to be made open access. • Springer and Elsevier $3000 per article • Am Chemical Society $1000 per article • Am Physical Society $900-$1300 • Natl Academy of Sciences $1000 • Oxford Univ Press $1500 • Cambridge Univ Press $2700 • Small uptake so far. All programs very new.

19. Green open access • Self-archiving by authors. • Study of Economics journals (Bergstrom-Lavaty) • Free online versions available for 90% of economics articles published in high impact journals • For 50% of articles in lower impact econ journals • Only 30% of political science journals. • Expansion of posting increases price elasticity of demand, should ultimately lower prices • Some worry that it may kill even low priced journals. • I doubt it: Here’s why…

20. Making demand more elastic • Subscription of commercial journals will fall only if demand becomes more elastic. How can universities accomplish this? • Encourage (maybe mandate) self-archiving. • Show backbone in cancelling over priced journals. Set firm thresholds of value per dollar and refuse to subscribe to things that cost more. • Users still will have access to pay-per-view if they really value articles in overpriced journals.

21. Untangling the bundles • To employ value-based subscriptions, libraries need to be able to evaluate bundles and know when to reject bundles and subscribe only to single journals that are above threshold. • Help is on the way. • Journal prices.com • Eigenfactor.org

22. Eigenfactor.org • Uses Google-like algorithm to calculate weighted citations from other journals. • Gives an estimate of fraction of scholar accesses going to each journal. • Presents estimates of value per dollar for each journal. • Shows cheapest way to buy any given fraction of citations. • Also evaluates journals not in the ISI database.

23. Coming up with eigenvalue • Tools for evaluating package versus buying best deals one by one. • This will help libraries to bargain intelligently over bundle prices.

24. Had enough? OK,, I’ll Quit Ruins of Library at Ephesus Ruins of Stanford Library