Mark McCabe and Christopher Snyder, The best business model for scholarly journals: an economist's perspective, Nature, July 16, 2004. Excerpt: "On one side of the market, authors benefit from greater impact and citations and thus prefer a journal that has more readers. On the other side of the market, readers benefit from content and thus prefer journals with more articles. Determining the optimal balance between these two sets of players involves measuring the benefits that each side obtains from greater or lesser participation by the other side, calculating the costs of adding (or subtracting) authors and readers, and then identifying the set of prices, i.e. the author fee and subscription price, that maximizes overall net benefits. Preliminary analysis of this problem suggests that optimal prices will differ depending on the degree of competition in the market for journals. At one extreme --a monopoly journal-- prices chosen by a profit-maximizing journal will typically be positive for both authors and readers, even if distribution costs are assumed to be zero....At the other extreme --perfect competition between equal-quality journals-- a continuum of equilibriums are possible, some of which favour readers and some of which favour authors, often including Open-Access as an equilibrium."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/03/2004 04:38:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
