The Economics of Journal Publishing
Case study: Ecology
Estimating circulation
Journal numbers over time
Comparing other fields
Prices and publishers across disciplines
Cumulative plots across disciplines
Papers
Will open access be able to compete?
Costs and benefits of site licenses
Electronic subscriptions: A boon for whom?
Value and price by journal
Contact Information
Department of Biology
University of Washington
Box 351800
Seattle, WA 98195-1800
cbergst@u.washington.edu
In the previous case-study, we saw that for-profit journals tend to be more expensive per-page than are non-profit or jointly-owned journals. Examination of six fields - ecology, economics, atmospheric sciences, mathematics, neurobiology, and physics - reveals a very similar pattern in each discipline.
Indeed, average price per page - shown in the table below - differs dramatically across publisher types. These differences are consistant across in all six fields studied.
| Price/Page | |||
| Field (year, # journals) | For-profit | Joint | Non-profit |
| Ecology (2000, n=78) | $1.19 | $0.70 | $0.19 |
| Economics (2000, n=156) | $0.81 | $0.42 | $0.16 |
| Atmos. Sci. (1999, n=34) | $0.95 | $0.15 | |
| Mathematics (2000, n=171) | $0.70 | $0.27 | |
| Neuroscience (1997, n=71) | $0.89 | $0.10 | |
| Physics (1997, n=93) | $0.63 | $0.19 |
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Last modified November 7, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Carl T. Bergstrom