The Cost of Knowledge: Academic Journal Pricing and Research Dissemination

Abstract

The academic community is deeply concerned about elevated prices of academic journals and substantial publisher power. To evaluate the effects of these access barriers, we assemble a comprehensive database covering articles, journals, and publishers across three main academic disciplines: economics, physics, and electrical engineering. Exploiting variations in publishers' product portfolios that do not directly affect an article's outcomes for identification, we find consistently adverse effects of access barriers across disciplines. In particular, a 1% rise in journal price leads to a 0.56% decline in citations for an economics article within five years of publication. Similarly, a 1 percentage-point increase in a publisher’s quality-weighted journal share corresponds to a 0.84% decline in citations within the same period. The detrimental effects on citations, as well as on citing authors and collaborative research measures, are more pronounced for lower-ranked institutions and in developing countries. In addition, we highlight subscription disparity using library-publisher contracts and utilize the timing of journals exiting publisher paywalls to demonstrate an immediate boost in article citations.

Keywords: Knowledge Dissemination, Academic Publishing, Market Power

JEL Classification: O3, L1, A1