David Zetland, An Auction Market for Journal Articles, a preprint. Abstract: 'Publishing a journal article is difficult --authors fear and suffer misplacement, delay, overburdened editors and dense reviewers. Publishing is also important --greater efficiency can have big impacts. Here I present a market solution to improve article valuation, editorial e±ciency and the returns to prestigious journals. This system pays auction money to the authors and publishers of works cited by the auctioned paper. This paper examines economic articles; inclusion of other fields would generate positive network effects.'
(Thanks to Alex Tabarrok and Mike Linksvayer, who have both blogged comments on the idea. Quoting Tabarrok: 'The money paid in the auction would flow not to the author of the paper but to authors cited by the paper and their publishers....The cleverness of the idea now becomes apparent. Publishers will be willing and able to pay for papers because they expect to earn revenues when in turn those papers are cited....Once it gets off the ground, the market for journal articles is self-sustaining and self-fulfilling.' Quoting Linksvayer: 'If the journal market idea really could foster a self-sustaining business model it could be a boon to the open access movement. Restricting access is rather pointless when your main business concern is to get your articles cited.')
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/17/2004 01:06:00 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.
