Economic Issues Concerning Electronic Publishing and Distribution of Scholary Articles

WHILE THERE HAVE BEEN LITERALLY HUNDREDS of articles and other publications dealing with electronic publishing, few go beyond expressions of opinion or speculation. Very few recent publications, even those having the term “economics” in their titles, provide any empirical evidence concerning these speculations. This article presents some economic issues, provides some quantitative evidence concerning the economics of scholarly journal publishing, and extends these data to examine the economics of electronic publishing. It is believed that publishers and librarians alike tend to apply traditional economic approaches to journal publishing in which economic competition is among journals. However, evidence shows that consumer choices are in fact among alternative ways of obtaining needed information and the attributes of the alternative sources of information rather than choices among journals. Readers of scholarly articles appear to apply a valid economic rationale to deciding from which source to obtain needed information. These economic choices appear to drive the current journal market demand and may do so for electronic alterna

[1]  Donald W. King.  Statistical indicators of scientific and technical communication, 1960-1980 , 1976 .

[2]  Hedvah L. Shuchman,et al.  Information transfer in engineering , 1981 .

[3]  Eric Bryant.  Reinventing the University Press. , 1994 .

[4]  J. M. Lufkin,et al.  The Reading Habits of Engineers a Preliminary Survey , 1966 .

[5]  Clifford A. Lynch,et al.  Reaction, response, and realization: From the crisis in scholarly communication to the age of networked information , 1992 .

[6]  Czeslaw Jan Grycz.  Economic models for networked information , 1992 .

[7]  Yale M. Braunstein.  An economic rationale for page and submission charges by academic journals , 1977, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[8]  Ann C. Schaffner,et al.  The Future of Scientific Journals: Lessons from the Past , 1994 .

[9]  Malcolm Getz.  Electronic Publishing: An Economic View , 1992 .

[10]  Francis W. Wolek,et al.  Technology, Information and Organization; Information Transfer in Industrial R and D. , 1967 .

[11]  C. Lee Jones,et al.  Scientific Journals in the United States: Their Production, Use, and Economics , 1983 .

[12]  Andrew M. Odlyzko,et al.  Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholary Journals , 1996, J. Univers. Comput. Sci..

[13]  Ann Okerson.  The missing model: A “circle of gifts” , 1992 .

[14]  D. King,et al.  Special libraries : increasing the information edge , 1993 .

[15]  N. Mullins,et al.  Coherent social groups in scientific change. , 1972, Science.

[16]  Don Schauder,et al.  Electronic Publishing of Professional Articles: Attitudes of Academics and Implications for the Scholarly Communication Industry , 1994, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[17]  Gary Stix,et al.  The Speed of Write - Internet , 1994 .

[18]  J R Pierce,et al.  The Future of Scientific Journals , 1967, Science.

[19]  Sanford V. Berg,et al.  An economic analysis of the demand for scientific journals , 1972, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[20]  Gordon R. Williams.  Library subscription decisions , 1975, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[21]  M. Tushman.  Special Boundary Roles in the Innovation Process. , 1977 .

[22]  W. Edward Steinmueller,et al.  An Economic Analysis of Scientific Journal Prices: Preliminary Results , 1992 .

[23]  Thomas E. Pinelli,et al.  Technical communication in aeronautics - Results of an exploratory study , 1989 .

[24]  G. Dunn,et al.  Goodbye to Gutenberg? , 1993, Nature.

[25]  Michael Lesk.  Pricing electronic information , 1992 .

[26]  Ching-Chih Chen.  The use patterns of physics journals in a large academic research library , 1972, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[27]  Hans-Dieter Daniel,et al.  Guardians of Science: Fairness and Reliability of Peer Review , 1994 .

[28]  Donald W. King,et al.  Scientific journals in the United States: Their production, use, and economics , 1981 .

[29]  W. D. Garvey.  Communication, the essence of science , 1979 .