A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing

If you have found this article useful and you think it is important that researchers across the world have access, please consider donating, to ensure that this valuable collection remains Open Access.

Prometheus is published by Pluto Journals, an Open Access publisher. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles from our international collection of social science journals. Furthermore Pluto Journals authors don’t pay article processing charges (APCs).

Prometheus

Volume 35, Issue 1

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing

research-article

Author(s): Jason Potts ^a , John Hartley ^b , Lucy Montgomery ^b , Cameron Neylon ^b , Ellie Rennie ^c

Publication date (Print): 1 March 2017

Journal: Prometheus

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Bookmark

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 self-constituted 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.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Jason Potts:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1468-870X

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.2307/j50022063

Journal ID (jcode): prometheus

Title: Prometheus

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN: 0810-9028

ISSN: 1470-1030

Publication date (Print): 1 March 2017

Volume: 35

Issue: 1 ( doiID: 10.1080/prometheus.35.issue-1 )

Pages: 75-92

Affiliations

jason.potts@ 123456rmit.edu.au

[ ^a ]School of Economics, Marketing and Finance, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

[ ^b ]Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

[ ^c ]School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Article

Publisher ID: 08109028.2017.1386949

DOI: 10.1080/08109028.2017.1386949

SO-VID: cba55f1d-6199-41da-82f2-bded9ec1e182

License:

All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Custom metadata

lang eng

ScienceOpen disciplines: Computer science,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,Law,History,Economics

Notes

This is closely related to the concept of a community of practice (Amin and Roberts, 2008).
We mean this in the sense both of open innovation economics (models of open knowledge production) (von Hippel, 2005; Chesbrough, 2003), and also of team production (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972). An ‘open team’ is a concept that is separately defined in microeconomics, but not in its conjunction (cf. an innovation commons).
Scholarly publishing has the same logic as a research department in the sense of organising itself into problem-domain themes – a point that has been made by Kling et al. (2002) in reference to the efficacy of the underlying guild model of scientific production and publishing.
For example, invited articles with the implication of lower refereeing hurdles, or free submission to journals normally requiring article processing charges.
For Cinema Journal see http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=cinema_journal; and for the Journal of Finance see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-6261/homepage/Society.html, where ‘Membership in the Association is ... available only through written application’.
https://steem.io/.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] This is closely related to the concept of a community of practice (Amin and Roberts, 2008).

[2] We mean this in the sense both of open innovation economics (models of open knowledge production) (von Hippel, 2005; Chesbrough, 2003), and also of team production (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972). An ‘open team’ is a concept that is separately defined in microeconomics, but not in its conjunction (cf. an innovation commons).

[3] Scholarly publishing has the same logic as a research department in the sense of organising itself into problem-domain themes – a point that has been made by Kling et al. (2002) in reference to the efficacy of the underlying guild model of scientific production and publishing.

[4] For example, invited articles with the implication of lower refereeing hurdles, or free submission to journals normally requiring article processing charges.

[5] For Cinema Journal see http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=cinema_journal; and for the Journal of Finance see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-6261/homepage/Society.html, where ‘Membership in the Association is ... available only through written application’.

[6] https://steem.io/.