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A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing
- Author(s):
- John Hartley, Lucy Montgomery (see profile) , Cameron Neylon (see profile) , Jason Potts, Ellie Rennie
- Date:
- 2017
- Group(s):
- Economics & Literature, Library & Information Science
- Subject(s):
- Economics and literature, Open access publishing, Publishers and publishing, Knowledge, Sociology of
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Literature and economics, Open access, Publishing, Scholarly communication, Sociology of knowledge
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6V52C
- Abstract:
- A new economic model for the analysis of scholarly publishing – journal publishing in particular – is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In this model, publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a selfconstituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense, a journal is a club. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities of a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against the negative externalities of crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a knowledge club is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial
- Share this:
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