Incubating Open Journals in Economics
Malcolm Getz
Vanderbilt University
Nashville TN 37235-1819
Malcolm.Getz@Vanderbilt.edu
Abstract
As open journals become intellectual successes, they will come to substitute for
subscription-based journals. The entry of two new journals specializing in economic
theory, one a commercial subscription journal and the other an open journal, stimulates
the question: What does a new journal require in order to achieve intellectual impact?
Regressing the ISI Impact Factor for 141 journals on attributes of the journals estimates
their relative importance. The intellectual reputations of the editors and of the authors’
prior work along with the number of libraries that hold the title are positively associated
with the journal’s Impact Factor. Using the attributes of the new journals in the estimated
relationships yields a forecast of the Impact Factor for the new journals. An open journal
has the advantage of being immediately as accessible everywhere on the Internet as
though held by many libraries. Its forecast impact is comparable to the journals with the
highest impact in this specialty. Some open journals are able to attract outstanding editors
and authors with the natural advantage of universal access without charge.
I appreciate the continuing support of The Cornell University Project on Creating an
Open Access Paradigm for Scholarly Publishing and the assistance of Claire Hecht and
Ararat Osipian in gathering data. I also appreciate the comments of Paul Gherman, Ken
King, and John Siegfried.
October 20, 2005
Will open access journals achieve intellectual reputations at least comparable to
those of subscription journals? If open journals are intellectual successes, they will come
to substitute for some subscription-based journals. Many other changes in the culture of
scholarship are likely to follow, including better integration of pre-prints and other
archival materials into the universe of scholarship as well as increased international
participation in scholarship.
The launch of new journals provides an opportunity for weighing the strengths
and weaknesses of the two kinds of journals. As new journals of each type appear, there
is an opportunity to forecast their likely success and, in a few years, to gauge the
accuracy of the forecasts.
Economics is a useful arena to consider the incubation of new journals because
two new similar journals have entered this arena in 2005-06. One, the International
Journal of Economic Theory (IJET), first appeared in March 2005 as a subscription
journal published by Blackwell in association with the International Society for
Economic Theory. It bears a library rate of $420 per year in the US for print with a
premium online service.1 The other, Theoretical Economics (TE), announced in August
2005 with a March 2006 first issue, is an open journal produced by the Society for
Economic Theory.2 There is no charge to readers or libraries. Authors pay $75 to submit
International Society for Economic Theory (2005). International Journal of Economic
Theory. K. Nishimura and M. Yano.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1742-7355 . The Premium Online
Service authorizes access to electronic archives and in press articles, allows use by walkin clients, and use in electronic reserves and interlibrary loan in addition to the standard
online services of electronic access to the published materials via campus network and
authenticated IP addresses.
2
Society for Economic Theory (2005). Theoretical Economics. M. J. Osborne. Toronto,
Canada. 2005: website for new open journal. http://www.econtheory.org/
1
essays. There are additional fees to authors if submissions do not conform to standards.
TE is produced using the University of Toronto’s digital archiving system with the public
domain journal management software, Open Journal System.(Willinsky 2004) TE is
available to all readers without charge on the Internet. Print can be provided for extra
fees. Both journals have international editorial boards and welcome articles that address a
wide range of issues in economic theory.
Part of the difference in the new journals may reflect the profit status of their
publishers. The average price of a print library subscription to an economics journal with
a premium online campus service from a commercial publisher are more than three times
higher per page than similar journals from not-for-profits. The average library
subscription price of journals published by not-for-profit publishers is $0.31 per page.
Journals published by commercial presses other than Blackwell average $0.98 per page.
Blackwell, an intermediate case, is a commercial publisher that publishes a number of
journals under contract with scholarly societies. The terms of the contracts vary from title
to title but may cause some of their prices to be closer to the non-profit publisher rates.
For this reason, the prices of Blackwell journals appear as a third category with a mean
price of $0.54 per page. Figure 1 shows the frequency distribution of the price per page of
economics journal in 2004. (The Journals are those with ISI Impact Factors as explained
below.) Successful entry of open-access journals would appear at the zero price point in
the not-for-profit set and could provide competition to both commercial and non-profit
subscription titles.
[See Figure 1.]
2
Which new economics journals will gain the greater intellectual success, the
conventional commercial journal or the open-access journal? Because the two new
journals target the same, well-defined audience, differences in the intellectual influence
of the two journals may be ascribed to pricing and technological differences. Because the
two journals are new, neither journal’s stature at launch depends on its own past
performance. The analysis here describes the existing journals in economics in order to
show the likely position of the new journals. The analysis concludes with a discussion of
broader implications for scholarly publishing.
Journals in Economics
Successful journals have intellectual influence. Well-known authors submit their
better works to more influential journals and expect their works to be cited more
frequently. A core issue for open access journals is the extent of intellectual influence
they are likely to achieve.
The ISI Impact Factor is a commonly used measure of intellectual influence. The
number of citations to articles published in one year that appear in publications in the two
subsequent years is taken as a ratio to the number of articles in the year. The analysis here
uses a four-year average impact factor for each journal to better reflect longer-term
patterns of influence and abstract from year-to-year variation. The mean impact factor for
154 economics journals is 0.77 with a standard deviation of 0.74. The minimum of the
154 is the Jahrbucher Fur Nationalokonomie Und Statistik at 0.10 and the maximum is
the Journal of Economic Literature at 6.0.
A core concern for a group of scholars who want to launch their own new journal
is how to maximize its intellectual influence. The discussion below considers a variety of
3
features of journals that are likely to be associated with intellectual influence. Few of the
features are exogenous. The statistics presented below are descriptive of the patterns in
existing journals but cannot be interpreted as reflecting causal relationships.
The goal is to anticipate how the new journals will fit among existing journals.
EconLit indexes over 400 major journals in economics.3 The ISI Journal Citation Report
records an impact factor for 154 economics journals from 2000 to 2003. ISI includes a
journal in its report for economics journals when the journal’s impact exceeds a threshold
and its focus is primarily economics. This investigation uses information about prices and
editors for the 141 economics journals that had Impact Factors reported for four years.
The analysis here considers attributes of journals that can be observed at the
launch of new journals that relate to a journal’s Impact Factor. Consider the association
of observable attributes of existing journals with their Impact Factors, and then assume
the same association is likely to apply for the new journals. Use the relationship to
compute a forecast of the ISI Impact Factor for new journals and journals that are too
young yet to have reported ISI Impact Factors.
A principle attribute of strong journals is the intellectual reputations of the editors.
Authors are drawn to publish their works in journals whose editors are well known and
whose expertise may allow them to suggest improvements in the articles. More editors
may mean that an article submitted for publication gets more attention. A larger group of
editors may also indicate that the journal attracts more attention. The journals’ websites
3
The AEA website (September 15, 2005) lists 1,100 journal titles as being indexed in
whole or in part in EconLit. http://www.econlit.org/journal_list.html Not all are currently
published. The list includes titles like the Accounting Review and the Yale Law Journal
that, although of interest to economists, would have a primary listing under another
discipline.
4
and printed issues provide a list of current editors. The analysis includes a count of
editors, including associate editors and members of editorial boards. (Advisory boards are
excluded from the analysis.) To measure the scholarly reputation of the editors, we record
the mean count of “Cited By” of the five most cited works of each editor as recorded on
Google Scholar. The journals averaged 29 editors and the average count of “cited by” is
79 (averaging the average for the 141 journals) as shown in Table 1.
A second attribute of strong journals is the intellectual reputations of the authors
whose work appears in the journal. Authors are likely to be drawn to submit better works
to journals where other influential authors have published their own articles. The analysis
includes the average count of “cited by” for the authors whose work appears in a recent
issue of each journal. The average number of citations to the authors’ works over all 141
journals is 35.
A third attribute is the presence of the journal in the library collections of the
world. Libraries play an important role in providing access to scholarship for faculty,
students, and others. A journal that is held by more libraries is more likely to have its
articles be more widely cited. The OCLC WorldCAT service provides a count of libraries
that have posted their ownership of the title (not necessarily current receipt) in the OCLC
database. Approximately 40 percent of libraries post titles held in OCLC.4 The OCLC
count is likely to be correlated across journals with the total number of libraries that hold
the journal. The average WorldCAT count of libraries that hold the journal for the 141
About 41 percent of libraries record their serials holdings in OCLC’s database. This
estimate derives from comparing the 1,841 libraries reporting holding the American
Economic Review to the 4,482 subscriptions reported by the American Economic
Association (AEA). Some of the AEA’s subscriptions are to banks and research institutes
that may be less likely to participate in OCLC than academic and public libraries.
4
5
journals is 416, a number consistent with about 1,000 libraries holding the average
journal. OCLC member libraries include academic, public, and business libraries as well
as research institutes, in the US and around the world.5
The price of the journal to libraries is another way of measuring likely access
through libraries. Because the OCLC holdings measure is imperfect, the price of the
journals to libraries may correlate with the number of libraries who hold the title
currently. The library price used in the analysis is the rate that includes premium campus
online access when it is available. A few of the journals do not offer an online service and
are omitted from the analysis. The average library price is $701 including online access.
The correlation between the WorldCAT count and the library price is -0.18, an indication
that price is measuring something different than the count of libraries. The library price
correlates with personal subscription rates.
Twelve of the 141 journals have a submission fee for at least some authors.
Higher submission fees might discourage authors from submitting their works and so
tend to lower the intellectual influence of the journal. The analysis uses a binary variable
to flag the presence of a submission fee rather than including the magnitude of the fee
itself because the variety of structures of fees for authors is not easily captured in a
continuous variable. Some author fees are waived for members; some are waived for
authors who review for the journal. Author fees may vary depending on the format of the
submission, as with TE, and with page charges. A recent survey of publishers across
disciplines indicates that author charges are commonly used by both subscription and
open journals.(Morris 2005)
5
More than 53,000 libraries of all kinds in 96 countries and territories participate in
OCLC’s services. http://www.oclc.org/about/default.htm
6
Journals published by not-for-profit publishers may have advantages in creating
influence. Forty of the journals are not-for-profit. Not-for-profits might be more effective
in creating intellectual influence, for example, in attracting donated services from editors
and reviewers. Alternatively, not-for-profits might be less efficient if consensus among a
large, volunteer board is needed to make major decisions concerning the journal in
contrast to the possibly more decisive action of a for-profit entity.
The age of a journal may also affect its influence. Because reputations take time
to build and tend to persist, older journals may have an advantage. Thirty-one of the
journals predate 1960. At the same time, a new journal might catch new trends or more
easily achieve a sharper focus that authors and readers find appealing. Five journals
postdate 1995. Table 1 shows the mean year of launch for the journals was 1969 (median
is 1977). The analysis includes a binary for launch before 1960 and another for launch
after 1995.
Preliminary analysis showed that the Journal of Economic Literature is an outlier.
It publishes only commissioned review articles and gets its own binary in the analysis.
The number of pages published per year is included. A larger journal may draw
more attention to the articles it publishes. The journals average 956 pages per year.
Thirty-three of the journals are general interest journals, that is, they have no
specialty.6 The other 108 journals group into 19 specialty groups. Eight journals are in
economic theory, the specialty of the two new journals. Three journals are in
econometrics and four are in macroeconomics, two specialties often viewed as in the core
Dhuey, E. and T. C. Bergstrom (2005). New Data on Journal Prices in Economics.
Santa Barbara, CA. http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/pricing.html
6
7
of the discipline. Six are in labor economics, a specialty that preliminary analysis showed
had differential impact.
On average, articles in a recent issue of each journal had already been cited about
seven times at the time of publication.7 Essays circulate as working papers, are presented
at workshops and conferences, and are posted on the Internet, allowing citation before
publication. Formal publication ratifies the work but is often not the starting point for its
influence. This variable doesn’t appear in the analysis but receives more comment below.
The character of editing provided by the journal would be an appropriate attribute
of a journal to include in the analysis but no measure is available. Some journals have
well-paid editors, some use only volunteers. Lead editors manage the process of deciding
what to accept for publication.
A significant amount of editorial services occurs after the decision to publish. A
recent survey of groups of publishers reported that as many as 60 percent of some groups
of journals edit content.8 Among 34 journals associated with the Association of American
Medical Colleges, about 25 percent edit content. Nearly all journals, for example 96
percent of the 34 journals in the Association of American Medical Colleges group,
7
At the time of the survey in the summer, 2005, we took the most recent issue of each
journal and noted the number of “cited by” items at Google Scholar for each article. The
count was typically within three months of publication, too soon for authors of the citing
works to have read the article in publication, referenced it in a new work, and have had
the work be published. Note, however, that some journals now post articles online “in
press” some months in advance of the official publication date.
8
The Association of Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP) in the
United Kingdom reports that 62 percent of the 128 journals published by its members edit
content. Among the 85 journals published by the HighWire Press at Stanford 39 percent
edit content. Among 248 journals surveyed from the the Directory of Open Access
Journals, 34 percent edit content.Morris, S. (2005). The facts about open access.
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK, Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers. 2005. http://www.alpsp.org/publications/FAOAcomplete.pdf Table 36, page
48.
8
provide copy-editing to improve the grammar and style of their articles; a few do not.
Including in the analysis information about the extent of editing provided by the journal
would allow estimating how editorial services relate to intellectual impact. Presumably,
more extensive editing increases readership and influence.
A closer look at the journals in economic theory shows where the new journals in
this subfield will fit. Table 2 reports details for a prominent general journal for
comparison, nine existing journals in economic theory, and the two new journals.
[See Table 2.]
The description of the ten established journals raises the question as to the
demand for new journals in this arena. The opening editorial in IJET points to a “serious
shortage of both journal pages and journal selection that exists in the field of economic
theory.”(Nishimura and Yano 2005) Yet, the two young journals in this field are more
than five years old, are held by relatively few libraries, and have so far not achieved
sufficient intellectual effect as to be indexed by ISI. The number of pages in the youngest
journal, International Game Theory Review, is below that of all the others. Several of the
existing journals could double their page count and still be within the range of pagecounts of the titles in the group. The price of IJET at launch is well above that of the two
young journals.
In contrast, TE justifies its launch with the belief that “Open Access is the right
way to disseminate scientific information.”(Society for Economic Theory 2005) It makes
no claim that important essays remain unpublished, but rather says that open access will
give authors “maximum possible exposure for their work.” TE then intends to substitute
open access publication for conventional subscription-based publication.
9
The central question for success in each case is likely to be whether the journals
will attract quality work from economic theorists. If the founders of IJET are correct, the
hoped-for growing influence of their new journal will not reduce the influence of related
journals, presumably because good quality work is going unpublished. If the founders of
TE are correct, their journal will attract better quality articles away from existing
journals. TE’s rising influence will come at the expense of lower influence of other
journals. The established journals then define the playing field. Will the new entrants
succeed by producing journals of greater influence than some existing journals? Will the
new open-access journal be more influential than the new subscription journal from a
commercial press?
Patterns in Impact Factors
The analysis here considers how the Impact Factor of journals relates to their
other attributes. A regression of the Impact Factor on the number of editors, the average
rate of citation to the editors’ five most cited works, and the number of libraries in OCLC
reporting that they hold the journal, and the other variables mentioned above appears in
table 3.
[See Table 3.]
Because causal relationships go in both directions, these statistics are simply
descriptive rather than providing a test of causality. Libraries are more likely to buy
journals with high impact factors just as high impact factors are likely to be generated by
journals that are more widely read when found in more libraries. Editors with stronger
reputations are more likely to be drawn to work for journals with higher Impact Factors
just as more capable editors are likely to produce a journal with more impact. Even
10
though we cannot disentangle causality, the regression describes a pattern among
journals.
The regression reported in table 3 shows a strong relationship among the variables
in line with expectations. The Journal of Economic Literature is treated separately as an
outlier with its own binary that shows a large positive effect. The intellectual reputations
of the editors as indicated by the average “cited by” counts in Scholar have a strong
association with the ISI Impact Factor as does the “cited by” count for previous work by
the authors in a recent issue. The WordCAT count of libraries holding the title also has an
association with impact. Editors with stronger intellectual reputations are associated with
journals with higher impacts. Authors with stronger intellectual reputations publish in
journals with higher impact factors. When more libraries hold a title, the journal’s impact
is higher.
Price and fees, number of pages, the age and profit status of the journals aren’t
associated with the impact factor, other things equal. Given the other features of the
journals included in the analysis, journals with higher prices are associated with neither
higher nor lower impacts. This fact bodes well for open-access journals. If higher
subscription revenues were associated with more intensive editorial services that yielded
more impact, then open access journals would be climbing uphill. With impact not
associated with price, the open access journal may hope to have significant intellectual
impact with modest revenue streams, provided it has a strong editorial group.
The fact that journals with more pages are not associated with higher intellectual
impact, other things equal, also bodes well for open-access journals. A journal can
achieve significant intellectual impact without publishing a large volume of pages.
11
Perhaps quality and focus matter as much or more than scale. A new entrant may more
readily pursue quality and focus than scale. Similarly, the lack of influence of age
suggests that new journals face no significant reputational disadvantage for being young.
That author fees are not associated with lower impact, other things equal, also
suggests that author fees may be a possible source of revenue. So few existing journals
have such fees and the nature of the fees vary enough that conclusions here may be
unwarranted. That the profit status of the journal is unrelated to impact, other things
equal, suggests that the for-profit and non-for-profit publishers work within common
constraints. Not-for-profit journals have an important place.
The five binaries for fields treat all other fields as the omitted set. General interest
journals show no different impact than the omitted groups nor do the econometrics
journals. Interestingly, journals in economic theory show a statistically significant lower
impact factor, other things equal, as do the macroeconomic journals. The journals in labor
economics show a positive bump in impact. Each field may have its own conventions in
terms of citing other material. If each article cites fewer other works, citation rates in a
subfield will be lower than average.
Forecasting Impact Factors
The estimated relationship shown in table 3 allows a forecast of ISI Impact Factor
for journals for which the Impact Factor isn’t reported, including new journals. The
launch of IJET reveals information about its editorial board, authors, prices, and page
counts. It’s 24 editors show an average “cited by” count of 19 and its authors show a cited
by average of 30. The forecast of its ISI impact factor using the estimated regression
relationship is 0.22. This value is likely to grow if library holdings increase.
12
[See table 3.]
In contrast, Theoretical Economics has three advantages at launch. It has a
substantial number of editors, 42. The average “cited by” rate for its editors is 67, more
than triple that for the editors of the new commercial journal. The authors in the inaugural
issue have a cited by rate of 90 that is also triple that of the new commercial journal.
Open access provides instant availability everywhere, probably better than being held by
subscription in 500 libraries. (Open-access means essentially universal availability; the
500-library assumption is an assumption about the maximum number of institutions with
interest in economic theory at a zero price.) The given attributes of the TE journal at
launch yield a forecast for its ISI of 0.71. This forecast rate is similar to the 0.75 Impact
Factors of the Journal of Economic Theory and Games and Economic Behavior, the
leading journals in this specialty. The submission fee for TE is similar to that of other
good quality society publications and the regression does not signal that a submission fee
at going rates is associated with an adverse effect on expected Impact Factor. A recent
survey of publishers reports that requiring fees from authors encounters little
resistance.(Morris 2005)
The same method provides forecasts for Impact Factors for the two young
journals in the same specialty that did not have published scores. The forecast for the
Review of Economic Design (Springer is the publisher) is 0.67 and the forecast for the
International Game Theory Review (World Scientific is the publisher) is 0.23.
At launch, then, the open journal appears to have better prospects than the new
subscription journal.
13
Worldwide Impact
Three-fourths of the American Economics Association’s revenue from
subscriptions to its index database, EconLit, is from countries outside the US.
Scholarship is increasingly international. Open journals have a significant advantage in
being instantly available everywhere on the Internet without fees. Scholars all over the
world have ready access to open journals. As a consequence, citation rates are likely to
grow faster among open journals than among subscription journals. Open journals have a
significant advantage in attracting readers, authors, and editors everywhere on the
Internet simultaneously. This effect may cause the estimate here to understate the likely
impact of the open journal.
Google Scholar and ISI Impact
The exercise presented here uses information from Google Scholar and ISI as
alternate but comparable measures of scholarly impact. The two sources of data about
publishing differ in their scope and accuracy. To judge how they relate, consider using
Google Scholar to compute an impact factor that is comparable to the ISI Impact Factor.
As explained above, ISI uses its database of citations to compute the number of citations
to all the essays in an annual run of a journal that appear in its database in the two years
following the year of publication as a ratio to the number of articles in the year. Google
Scholar provides advanced search tools that allow one to compute the number of citations
in its citation database in the two years after publication and compute a score that is the
citations per article.
Searching for the number of citations in Google required searching each article
individually, a time consuming task. (Perhaps Google will automate it.) The analysis here
14
makes the comparison based on the comparable scores for 25 randomly selected journals
in economics for which ISI reported Impact Factors in 2003. The mean ISI Impact Factor
for the 25 was 0.836 and the mean for all 168 economics journals with scores in that year
was 0.765. The mean for the Google analog for the 25-journal sample was 3.963. (The
Google scores used here are for articles published in 2002.) On average Google gives
nearly a five times larger count. Its mechanical search of the Internet casts a wider net
and includes working papers, government documents, books, and other works not
included in the ISI database. Google’s search may also be sloppier with the inclusion of
inaccurate and duplicate references, an issue not explored here.
A regression of the Scholar-based factor on the ISI Impact Factor explores the
comparability of the two measures. The results, with t-ratios in parentheses, indicate that,
on the margin, there are 7.549 citations per article in the Google factor for each citation in
the ISI factor. The r-square is 0.667. In broad strokes, the Google Scholar impact factor
and the ISI Impact Factor are similar but not identical.
GoogleFactor =
-0.966 +
7.549
(-0.873)
(6.78)
ISI Factor
Two journals in the sample of 25 have substantial influence on the estimate.
Health Economics has an ISI factor of 1.713 that is high relative to the Google factor of
3.280. Econometrica’s ISI Factor of 2.737 is low relative to its Google factor of 22.244.
Perhaps Google’s universe captures more working papers in some domains than others
and perhaps scholars working in some domains show somewhat different behavior in
posting essays as working papers and in the number of citations per essay. Omitting these
15
two outliers, however, changes the regression result very little, yielding a coefficient of
8.93 with a t-ratio of 6.00 (r-square = 0.61).
More detailed investigation might explore the extent to which the differences are
the result of scope and accuracy. Open journals have the advantage of instant full-text
indexing via Google Scholar.
Pre-print Effect
A possible additional advantage for an open journal is the more frequent and
reliable access to preprints in open archives. Authors who aspire to publish their works in
open journals have less reason to refrain from posting works in progress as preprints.
Perhaps essays that are published in open journals will be more likely to have been cited
as preprints before publication in a journal. At the time of publication, of the 141
journals, 28 showed no citations to essays as they were published. The average rate over
all the journals was seven citations to the essays at publication. The highest average was
the American Economic Review (AER) with an average of 178 citations to the articles as
they were published. The AER had a reputation of having long publication lags that
would tend to allow citations to working papers to accumulate before publication.
Clearly, the culture of sharing working papers is well established in economics and
provides a natural advantage for open access journals that have fewer reasons to suppress
access to working papers or the articles themselves in any form. The rate of citation to the
essays in TE’s first issue won’t be known until their publication date in March 2006.
ISI reports as an Immediacy Factor, the number of citations to works in the same
year as the publication appears. The mean for Immediacy is 0.163. A regression of the
Scholar count of “cited by” for an issue at publication on the Immediacy Factor has an r-
16
square of 0.039 with coefficient on Immediacy of 28.75 (t = 2.03). Immediacy measures
something different than the Google Scholar measure. Google indexes working papers
and this may explain its much higher level of magnitude and low correlation with
Immediacy. Regressing Impact Factor in a year on Immediacy and the Google “cited by”
at publication yields an adjusted r-square of 0.463. The Immediacy Factor has a
coefficient of 3.60 (t= 8.79), an indication that Immediacy tracks Impact. The Google
cited-by-at-publication has a coefficient of 0.005 (t = 1.74), an indication that the Google
count has only a modest effect in forecasting Impact. The investigation reported here
used only one issue of each journal in computing the Google “cited by” at publication.
Measuring the count requires doing it for each issue as it appears because Scholar
continuously updates.
Implications
The analysis above demonstrates that new open journals are capable of attracting
a strong group of editors and are likely to generate high impacts within a relatively short
period of time. The new open journal in economic theory, TE, appears to launch with a
much higher probability of success than its subscription-based new competitor, IJET.
Indeed, its prospects are high relative to the established journals in this subdiscipline.
The forecast here of success for the open journal in economic theory is consistent
with the success shown for open journals in other fields. A citation study from Thompson
Scientific indicates that open journals are growing in number and many are enjoying
significant intellectual impact in medicine, life sciences, physics, engineering, and
mathematics.(McVeigh 2004) Although the details may differ, journals with strong
editorial boards that attract frequently cited authors and offer universal availability
17
through open access are likely to achieve significant intellectual impact quickly. Although
the analysis here looks only at journals in economics, the factors shown to be important
are likely to hold sway for journals in many disciplines.
Suppose, as seems likely, that the claim made by the editors of IJET noted above
is incorrect; that is, assume that most worthy essays in economic theory are already
readily published. Then, the success of the new open journal will come at the expense of
the influence of the existing journals. Authors who place their most promising work with
the open journal will submit fewer and less promising works to the other journals.
Although the journals in this field aren’t perfect substitutes intent only on maximizing
impact (they each may emphasize particular issues and reflect the tastes of editors and
authors), nevertheless, many authors may decide, on the margin, to prefer publication in
journals with more impact. Journals of lesser reputation in the economic theory field may
lose impact as Theoretical Economics attracts more influential authors.
To test this hypothesis, it will be useful to track how the impact factors for all the
journals in the field adjust over the years immediately ahead as the new entrants gain
reputation. At this point, we offer some speculation.
[See Figure 2.]
Figure 2 shows where the new entrants and young journals fall relative to the
established journals in terms of price per page (library rate with print and premium online
service) and ISI Impact Factor (forecast for those not published). The overall relationship
shows journals with higher prices per page having lower impacts. (Note that unlike the
regression reported above, Figure 2 does not control for other features of the journal.)
Games and Economic Behavior—GEB—has a relatively low price with a high impact.
18
The Journal of Mathematical Economics—JME—has a high price and relatively low
impact. Elsevier publishes both. One of the young journals, International Game Theory
Review—IGTR from World Scientific, is an outlier with a forecast for Impact Factor that
is lower than its price alone would suggest. The Journal of Economic Theory—JET, also
from Elsevier, has a somewhat higher impact factor relative to its price than the general
pattern.
The two new journals enter at each end of the range. The new commercial journal,
IJET, has a high price per page and a low forecast for Impact. The new open access
journal, TE in the figure, has a zero price and a forecast Impact Factor that is among the
top in this specialty at launch. If the assumptions here are correct, an open access journal
with a strong editorial group can launch with an expectation of high impact with low
price. All open-access journals should have the natural advantage of being as available as
a journal that is in every library, perhaps even more so because it is available on every
desktop.
Assuming that the number of journals doesn’t influence the rate of creation of
new essays in this specialty, the Impact Factors of existing journals with high prices and
limited library access should decline. The relationship shown in the figure will become
steeper. It should be particularly difficult for a new entrant like IJET with a high price
per page to gain intellectual influence.
The Journal of Economic Theory (JET in the figure) has a high price and strong
reputation. If the open access Theoretical Economics meets and sustains the forecast
given here, the Impact Factor for JET will decline. Successful open-access journals are
likely to bring a more pronounced tilt to the price—Impact Factor relationship.
19
Ultimately, some of the weaker journals, mostly those with high prices and low
intellectual impacts, will fold.
The success of a significant open access journal in economic theory might
encourage entry of other open access journals in economics. Indeed, there may be room
for additional entry by other open journals in the economic theory field, focused on
narrower subspecialties.
Open journals should be attractive to editors because readership is not tied to
subscription sale. Content will be readily accessible with full-text searching of Google
Scholar and other indexing services should quickly begin to index journals of substantial
intellectual impact. Authors may promote their work as preprints without fear of loss of
opportunity to publish in highly regarded journals. The significant rate of citations before
publication noted above indicates the importance of preprints in building reputations.
The unmeasured dimension of the journals is the effort put to providing editorial
services as noted above. Open access journals are more likely to rely on volunteer
managing editors and less likely to provide content and copy editing because they
generally operate with lower revenues. Advertising, institutional support, and author fees
may support, particularly, editorial services applied to articles after the decision to
publish them.
Universities
Successful entry by more journals will depend on universities sustaining the
necessary infrastructure and making it available to well-qualified scholarly groups who
will introduce and sustain open journals. University libraries are possible agents. There is
some fixed cost in setting up the infrastructure for archiving digital files and in
20
supporting the tools for managing the flow of materials through the editorial process. The
cost of supporting additional journals once the infrastructure is in place is modest.
Research universities that make significant expenditure on digital infrastructure to sustain
their research missions are likely to be willing and able to support open access journals.
Managing Editors
The critical actors are the leading scholars who edit journals. Will they find it
attractive to serve as lead editors for open access journals? The launch of Theoretical
Economics demonstrates the possibility. However, commercial and established society
publishers recruit and pay lead editors for their work. The open-access journal depends
on editors being supported by means other than revenue from journal subscriptions.
Theoretical Economics has volunteer editors, which might more properly be viewed as
editors supported directly by their home universities rather by the journal’s revenue.
The central challenge is in recruiting and sustaining lead editors, one to three
people who will manage the editorial process and make final editorial decisions. Suppose,
say, four dozen leading scholars with shared intellectual interests decided that they would
be better served by an open-access journal than conventional subscription journals. They
value the immediate, Internet-wide ease of access, participation in Google Scholar, and
relatively seamless integration of working papers with published work that an openaccess journal provides. They associate themselves as a professional society and anoint a
core group to serve as a board of directors to launch an open journal to serve their field.
All of them have agreed to serve as volunteers on the editorial board with a commitment
to review submissions and submit their own work and to encourage their students and
colleagues to submit their work for publication. The board of directors must find the
21
scholar among their number who will be the lead editor with perhaps one or two coeditors. The lead editor will need to be on a campus that will provide the infrastructure
for the new open journal without charge to the new scholarly society with the agreement
that the journal will be open and that the university will get prominent mention for its
services. The lead editor must also have the support of her or his department and dean for
taking on the role. The university’s infrastructure and support for a potential editor
probably come as a package. When an editor’s tour comes to an end, the board will seek a
replacement editor, presumably with backing from his or her home university. The launch
of Theoretical Economics demonstrates that this process can lead to a successful launch.
An alternative to direct university support is submission fees from authors as used
by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) for journals in medicine and biology. The PLoS
journals charge $1,500 submission fees and devote resources to copy-editing that yield
higher production values. Higher production values allow work to reach a wider
audience. In contrast, Theoretical Economics, like most academic journals, will depend
on authors to prepare their work in light of comments by reviewers and editors.
Theoretical Economics’ submission fee will support reviews by volunteers.
Author submission fees and page charges are likely to continue to be more
important for journals in disciplines where most research is funded from outside
universities. Author fees are typically a small fraction of the total size of grants. In
disciplines where funded research is less common, author fees are likely to be less
successful. Basic copying editing and manuscript preparing may cost $19 per page.9 At
9
An anonymous publisher (private communication) pays $19 per page for manuscript
preparation for one of its journals. The service includes: page makeup tabular, math,
captions, references, rules, boxes (if included in supporting data), rapid proofs, pick up of
22
this rate, a typical essay of 20 pages would require $380 in copy-editing and manuscript
preparation. (With more equations and tables, the cost will be over $600 per article.) A
journal with a strong intellectual reputation might invite authors to put their accepted
manuscripts in the necessary format or pay appropriate fees of this order of magnitude to
reach standards. Tying specific author fees to specific services would allow authors to
find an alternative or pay the fee. The submission fees might support the review process
while page charges pay for post-acceptance editing. Some journals pay reviewers and
some waive submission fees for authors who have reviewed other essays for the journal.10
Whether higher author fees can support more sophisticated editing of content is an open
question. The Public Library of Science appears to offer more than basic copy-editing
with a publication fee of $1,500 per article.
An analysis of the revenue and cost structure of academic journals indicates that
current library expenditures on journal subscriptions and associated support costs within
libraries are well above the cost of editing and producing the journals.(Getz 2005) A shift
to open-access journals could reduce the total flow of dollars from university budgets that
support journals without reducing expenditures on editorial services. This is possible
because of the significant level of profit in commercial publishing, the lower shipping
and transactions costs in making journals available at zero price, and the reduced costs to
standing pages, ASCII page processing, PDF page processing for archives, and archiving.
The rate for a more complex journal is $31.50 per page.
10
A colleague mentioned receiving a fee of $500 for preparing a review of an article for a
journal in economics. A submission fee of at least $1,000 would be necessary to support
two reviews per article at these rates. If associate editors add a third review, a submission
fee of $1,500 would be needed. Presumably such reviewer fees encourage speedy review.
Submission fees also play the role of discouraging casual submissions. A journal that
receives many more submissions than it can manage with volunteer reviewers may
impose a submission fee to limit submissions to those authors view as most promising.
23
libraries of avoiding payment systems.11 Open journals do not require the level of
revenue that commercial journals now receive.
Going further, the shift to open journals with university-based infrastructure may
lower the explicit university expenditures that now sustain the editorial costs through
subscriptions, at least for many academic journals that do not provide content editing
beyond what reviewers provide. The universities may find it more attractive to bid for
and sustain the scholars who are editors directly rather than using publishers as
intermediaries.
Scholarly Societies
Open journals pose a challenge to traditional scholarly societies. The established
societies depend on subscription revenue from libraries for a significant part of their
revenue. They also earn revenue from individual memberships that reflect primarily
journal subscriptions to individuals. Some receive advertising revenue that might be
reduced in open access, digital only journals. If open journals replaced subscription
journals, the scholarly society might continue to offer meetings and other member
services but would probably be smaller organizations. Scholarly societies do not have a
significant source of revenue other than from subscriptions and advertising that would
allow them to pay for the infrastructure and overheads that are needed to sustain open
11
Individual universities where faculty members publish at high rates could see a higher
expenditure on author fees than for journal subscriptions. The author fees, however,
should be considered as net of support of the fees paid by grants. On a net basis, even
universities with the most prolific faculty are likely to see a lower commit of core
university funds to the support of journals with open access and author fees than with
subscriptions. Granting agencies might make clear their support for open publishing in
their program announcements and funding policies.
24
journals. A fortiori, a society cannot convert from subscription to open journals and
generate surpluses to support other society activities.
The two new journals considered above were launched by new societies that
appear to have formed for the purpose of launching each journal. These societies appear
to have no other function. Neither society will subsidize its journal from other society
activities nor will the journals generate surpluses that the society might use to support
other functions. These societies will likely rise and fall with their respective journals.
Whether a traditional society might sustain premier journals with subscription and
author fee revenue and at the same time support other open journals using volunteer
editors and university infrastructure is an open question. There is a limit to the amount of
editorial services volunteer editors will provide. Premier journals may require
subscription revenue to support more on editorial services and thereby sustain a high
level of readership. The lack of information about the editorial services provided by the
journals in the analysis above precludes statistical inference here about the role of
editorial services in enhancing readership and influence. It is possible that a traditional
society will continue to use subscription revenue to support a high level of editorial
services with its premium journals that co-exist with open journals that do no postacceptance editing of content. The recent survey of journal publishers suggests that the
value of copy-editing is in decline among subscription journals.(Morris 2005)
Not-for-profit publishers have an advantage in being more plausible partners for
universities who support open journals edited by their faculty. Historically, universities
supported conventional print, subscription-based journals through their university
presses. Many journals were closely associated with their university hosts and some still
25
are. For example, The Journal of Political Economy is published by the University of
Chicago Press and is identified with the University. The universities gained reputation in
advancing scholarship through their journals. Hosting a journal in a field may have been
of value in recruiting faculty who published in the journal or who were editors. The
success of open journals may depend, in part, on research universities’ willingness to
provide the infrastructure for open journals and to support the editors who produce
distinguished journals.
In some cases professional societies sustain partnerships with universities who
host their journals. For example, the Virginia Commonwealth University currently helps
support the Southern Economic Journal. The professional society might, in effect,
franchise its name with a quality control mechanism to affiliated universities who provide
the infrastructure and support the core editorial services for open journals. The
professional society can move a successful journal from one campus to another should a
university host lose interest or quality slip.
An important choice falls to authors who weigh the advantage of likely greater
intellectual impact of open access but with editorial services limited to volunteers with
direct university support plus editorial services that author fees will support against a
probable lower level of intellectual impact with subscription-based journals but higher
level of editorial services. Editorial services, of course, are of different kinds. At one
level, subscriptions allow a publisher to pay higher salaries and so bid for more talent in
lead editors. At another level, publishers pay for rewriting, copy-editing, manuscript
preparation, and design that create more readable essays. Even in the subscription world
some journals performed reasonably well with volunteer editors, with editors contributing
26
their services with the encouragement of their universities in order to promote scholarship
in a community they valued. Subscription revenue paid for printing, mailing, and some
clerical support. Open access would appear to dominate this type of journal. At the same
time, some journals engage well-paid editors and provide a significant level of
manuscript development to produce journals that are more widely read as a consequence.
Subscription revenue may remain an effective way of supporting such journals. There is
then likely to be co-existence with a shift over time toward open journals as they realize
their potential.
The publication of scholarly journals is in flux caused by digital publishing and
the Internet. In many disciplines, journal articles that are not readily available on the
Internet are less likely to be read and cited.(Kurtz 2003; Brody 2004; McVeigh 2004) As
open journals succeed, perhaps even campus site licenses will be a deterrent to use.
Some publishers are experimenting with delayed open access, that is, allowing their
journals to be freely available on the Internet after six months or a year of publication.
Others allow an author to pay a fee, for example $3,000 per article at Springer, to have
his or her essay made freely and immediately available on the Internet.12 The survey of
publishers indicates participation by up to 25 percent of authors at some journals.(Morris
2005) These methods of providing partially open access seem likely to be intermediate
steps in a period of rapid evolution.
Open journal have natural advantages in instant, worldwide access with low
distribution costs. Universities and scholarly societies who can find ways to underwrite
the infrastructure and sustain quality editing are likely to enjoy increased intellectual
12
Springer Open Choice http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,440359-0-0-0,00.html
27
influence. There will most likely be a range of journal types with revenue sources and
editorial services that vary substantially across disciplines and within disciplines as well.
Each discipline has journals distributed over a range of intellectual influence. The entry
of Theoretical Economics along with some quite influential open journals in other
disciplines demonstrate that open journals will be found across most of the range of
influence. Authors and potential editors appear to be ready to take advantage of the open
opportunity where research universities provide the infrastructure and support their
faculty who are lead editors. Where philanthropy, government support, advertising, and
industry support are available, open access journals are likely to advance rapidly. Open
journals are moving well beyond the fringes of scholarly communication and into the
mainstream.
References
Brody, T., et al. (2004). The Effect of Open Access on Citation Impact.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/OA-TAadvantage.pdf
Dhuey, E. and T. C. Bergstrom (2005). New Data on Journal Prices in Economics.
Santa Barbara, CA.
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/pricing.html
Getz, M. (2005). "Open-Access Scholarly Publishing in Economic Perspective."
Journal of Library Administration 42(1): 1-39.
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/177/2/Getz_11Jun04.pdf
International Society for Economic Theory (2005). International Journal of
Economic Theory. K. Nishimura and M. Yano.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1742-7355
Kurtz, M. J. (2003). Restrictive Access Policies Cut Readership of Electronic
Research Journal Articles by a Factor of Two. OpCit The Open Citation
Project. Highfield, Southhampton, UK.
http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/kurtz.pdf
McVeigh, M. E. (2004). Open Access Journals in the ISI Citations Databases:
Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Factors. Philadelphia, PA, Thomson
Scientific.
http://www.thomsonisi.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2
.pdf
28
Morris, S. (2005). The facts about open access. Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex,
UK, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. 2005.
http://www.alpsp.org/publications/FAOAcomplete.pdf
Nishimura, K. and M. Yano (2005). ""Editorial"." International Journal of
Economic Theory I(1): 1.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1742-7355
Society for Economic Theory (2005). Theoretical Economics. M. J. Osborne.
Toronto, Canada. 2005: website for new open journal.
http://www.econtheory.org/
Willinsky, J. (2004). Public Knowledge Project Open Journal System. Vancouver,
BC, University of British Columbia. 2004: open source software for journal
management. http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/
29
Table 1 Average Values for 141 Economics Journals
Variable
ISI Impact Factor, 4-year average
Mean
StdDev
0.80
0.74
Number of Editors
29.35
15.16
Citations to Editors’ Works
78.82
73.78
Citations to Authors’ Works
34.84
44.47
WorldCAT Libraries, count
415.51
343.05
Library Price w/online, dollars
700.92
710.57
Submission fee=1
0.09
0.28
Not-for-profit=1
0.28
0.45
Before 1960=1
0.22
0.42
Post 1995=1
0.04
0.19
Journal of Economic Literature =1
0.01
0.08
956.40
540.04
1969.24
25.62
Cites at Publication
6.93
19.53
General Interest = 1
0.23
0.42
Theory = 1
0.06
0.23
Econometrics = 1
0.02
0.14
Macroeconomics = 1
0.03
0.17
Labor = 1
0.04
0.20
Pages in Year (100s)
Year Began
Source: Author’s calculations from ISI Journal Citation Reports, OCLC’s WorldCAT,
and journal websites.
30
Table 2 Journals in Economic Theory
Launch Pages
Journal
Library
Publisher
year
2004
price price/page WorldCAT
Econometrica
Society
1932
1,935
$550
$0.29
789
Journal of Economic Theory
Elsevier
1969
2,041
$2,498
$1.07
503
Springer
1971
600
$657
$1.10
198
Elsevier
1974
962
$1,571
$1.63
245
Elsevier
1979
2,552
$1,470
$0.82
211
Elsevier
1980
1,876
$1,547
$0.97
232
Behavior
Elsevier
1988
1,738
$700
$0.40
169
Economic Theory
Springer
1992
1,500
$1,219
$0.81
107
Review of Economic Design
Springer
1996
477
$312
$0.65
83
Scientific
1999
395
$267
$0.68
28
Blackwell
2005
310
$402 $1.30
4
Society
2006
560
$0 $0.00
500
International Journal of Game
Theory
Journal of Mathematical
Economics
Journal of Economic
Dynamics & Control
Journal of Economic Behavior
& Organization
Games and Economic
International Game Theory
Review
World
International Journal of
Economic Theory
Theoretical Economics
31
Source: OCLC World Cat, Journal Websites, author’s calculation. Library Price is the
price of print with a premium online license, if offered. Econometrica price is 2005 from
website. “WorldCAT” is the number of libraries with the journal title in its catalog as
listed on OCLC’s WorldCAT in May 2005. Multiply by 2.5 to estimate number of
libraries that hold the title. Econometrica is a general journal, shown for comparison. The
page counts for the International Journal of Economic Theory and Theoretical Economics
are extrapolations from the first issues. The WordCAT count for Theoretical Economics
is a rough guess as to the consequence of unlimited Internet access.
32
Table 3 Regression of ISI Impact Factor
Variable
Coefficient
t-ratio
Constant
0.064
0.557
Number of Editors
0.002
0.747
Citations to Editors’ Works
0.004
***
6.070
Citations to Authors’ Works
0.003
**
2.490
WorldCAT Libraries, count
0.001
***
3.060
Library Price w/online, dollars
-0.009
-1.020
Submission fee = 1
-0.183
-1.270
Not-for-profit = 1
-0.060
-0.562
Before 1960 = 1
0.043
0.362
Post 1995 = 1
0.305
1.360
Journal of Economic Literature =1
3.606
Pages in Year (100s)
0.014
1.140
General Interest = 1
-0.065
-0.628
Theory = 1
-0.368
Econometrics = 1
-0.251
Macroeconomics = 1
-0.506
*
-1.970
0.364
*
1.940
Labor = 1
***
**
6.620
-2.080
-0.874
n = 141. Adjusted r-square = 0.656. s = 0.4357. ANOVA F(16,124) = 17.7.
*** Statistically significant at the 0.01 level; ** at the 0.05 level, * at the
0.10 level, two-tailed tests.
33
Figure 1
Economics Journals: Price per Page
Frequency of Journala
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
$0.00
$0.50
$1.00
$1.50
$2.00
$2.50
$3.00
Price per Page 2004
not profit
Blackwell
Other Commercial
Source: Author’s calculation using data from the publications.
Figure 2
ISI Impact Factor
ISI Impact and Library Price
0.8
TE
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
$0.00
GEB
JET
JME
IGTR
$0.50
IJET
$1.00
$1.50
$2.00
Library Price per Page
New Journals
Young Journals
Established Journals
Source: Author’s calculation using data from the publications.
34