Abstract
In April 2013, all of the major academic publishing houses moved thousands of journal titles to an original hybrid model, under which authors of accepted papers can choose between an expensive open access (OA) track and the traditional track available only to subscribers. This paper argues that authors might now use a publication strategy as a quality signaling device. The imperfect information game between authors and readers presents several types of Perfect Bayesian Equilibria, including a separating equilibrium in which only authors of high-quality papers are driven toward the open access track. The publishing house should choose an open-access publication fee that supports the emergence of the highest return equilibrium. Journal structures will evolve over time according to the journals’ accessibility and quality profiles.
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Notes
Data are available on the web site of the Directory of Open Access journals at http://www.doaj.org.
According to their financial statements, operating profit margins of MPHs in the last 5 years are close to 30 %.
As a symbolic example of the mounting discontent among institutions of higher education institution regarding increasing charges for access to academic journals, in 2012 Harvard University encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through free dissemination channels such as OA journals. See “Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publisher’s price”, in The Guardian on April 24, 2012.
See http://www.tandfonline.com/page/ openaccess/funders#hybrid-pricing as accessed on March 1st, 2014.
One imperfect measure of a paper’s impact is the number of citations it has received within a given period. Using a sample of 100 journals in science and controlling for quality, McCabe and Snyder (2013b) found a net impact of OA publishing on citations of 8 %. Using economic journals, Müller-Langer and Watt (2015) found that at the current 3000$ OA fees, the net impact of OA publication on citations is negligible.
There is also a set of OA journals with poor publishing standards, driven by dubious material goals.
We follow the classical methodology pioneered by Spence (1973).
In this case, we must take into account the fact that a constant proportion of papers submitted to the traditional track is written by these resource-constrained scholars.
We implicitly assume that the cost of processing a paper does not vary from one track to another; we can set it to zero without a substantial loss in generality.
The formal decision problem might consider a reader benefit function, increasing in the quality of the paper and the reading effort, along the lines of “efficiency wage” models.
It can be shown that the opposite separating equilibrium does not exist.
A publishing house aiming to reach this pooling equilibrium in the least “aggressive” way will choose the lowest fee that guarantees it. For this “threshold” fee, it can be shown that any other set of readers’ beliefs is irrelevant according to the Cho–Kreps intuitive criterion (Cho and Kreps 1987).
This property points out that this hybrid equilibrium is unstable: any minor expectation shock would push authors of high-quality papers to shift massively either to the \(T{\text {-}}strategy\) or to the \(A{\text {-}}strategy.\)
Given that \(\lambda /\left( 1-\lambda \right) <1,\) a sufficient condition for \(c_{4}>c_{2}\) is \(\delta _{_{A}}>\delta _{T}(1+\mu ).\) Thus, chances that \(c_{4}>c_{2}\) are high if the proportion of outstanding papers (\(\mu )\) is small.
The slope of BB’ is lower than the slope of AA’. It can be checked analytically that they cannot cross above the 45\({{}^\circ }\) line (which would imply a logical contradiction, where \({R_\mathrm{PA}}>{R_\mathrm{PT}}>{R_\mathrm{Sep}}>{R_\mathrm{PA}}\)).
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by a public grant from the Labex ICCA (http://www.iccalab.fr). Radu Vranceanu carried out this study within the research framework of the Labex MME-DII. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. They are grateful to anonymous referees as well as to participants in the Research Workshop of the Strasbourg University in October 2014 for their remarks and suggestions.
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Besancenot, D., Vranceanu, R. A model of scholarly publishing with hybrid academic journals. Theory Decis 82, 131–150 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-016-9553-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-016-9553-0