Academic Journal Pricing and the Demand of Libraries

Abstract

The prices of for-profit academic journals have increased rapidly over the past decade (Barbara Albee and Brenda Dingley, 2001). There remains substantial debate as to the explanation for these increases. Among those put forward are the increased concentration of the journal industry (see e.g., McCabe, 2002) and the relatively recent effort by major publishers to bundle print and electronic journals (Aaron S. Edlin and Rubinfeld, 2004). While both explanations are undoubtedly important, what is missing is the significant role of the primary customers of journal publishers—the academic libraries. As agents of college and university faculties, libraries serve the interests of their principals while having only limited information about faculty journal demands. Facing little or no hard budget constraint, faculty are unlikely or unwilling to make difficult allocative choices. As a result, libraries have been making hard choices for years (between journals and books, and among journals), in a world of increasing budgetary pressure. Given that electronic transmission of knowledge is becoming increasingly important, an understanding of the reasons for the increases in journal prices is a vital element in the ongoing discussion of best mechanisms by which scholarly communications can be disseminated. In this paper, we formulate a model of library journal demand and suggest how it can be used to analyze the optimal pricing of journals by publishers. This represents part of a larger project whose long-range goal is to explain the pattern of journal pricing over time, and to evaluate two broad policy questions: (i) To what extent have mergers and/or bundling practices been responsible for the increase in journal prices? (ii) To what extent are journal prices likely to change in response to changing library acquisition strategies (reallocation of budgets between serials and books, journal sharing among libraries, setting hard budgets, etc.)?