Ted Bergstrom 
Economics Department 
UCSB 
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News items

Big Deals and No Big  Deals with Elsevier

European Economic Assn Disowns Elsevier's EER, and starts new JEEA
with MIT Press
EEA announcement

New Open Access Journal in Economics is launched (Aug 2005).
Theoretical Economics

Elsevier's profits
Check out  Morgan Stanley's research report

Who gets the loot?

More on executive pay

Miscellany

Weasel's Manual of Apologies  for 
Misbehaving Monopolists

Did you think politicians had a monopoly on meretricious arguments? 

The P.T. Barnum List

Would you believe that there are two economics journals that cost more than $8000 per year but  have almost no citations? Who are the libraries that subscribe to them?

The Parable of the Anarchists' annual meeting.

Why doesn't competition eliminate
excess profits in the journal industry?

Ted Bergstrom's 
Journal Pricing Page

My Papers  on Journal Pricing

This link includes papers that I have written or coauthored on journal pricing and a couple of responses from writers who disagreed with my views. 

Why are we doing free referee work for rogue  journals that skim huge profits from our research budgets and  restrict access to libraries at the richest universities?
Paul Courant, Preston McAfee and I are collecting information on prices paid by libraries to large publishers for Big Deal bundled site licenses.  Many of these contracts have confidentiality clauses that were insisted on by the publishers.  Fortunately most state open records acts overrule these clauses in contracts with state institutions. We are requesting copies from state universities by invoking state open record acts.  We are also requesting copies of contracts that do not have confidentiality clauses from universities and other agencies to which open records acts do not apply.
Elizabeth Dhuey and I   have recently updated my data on prices per page and per citation for  about 300 economics journals.  The data is now available for 2004 as well as for 1999.  We also have collected some data on prices and values of physics journals.   

  • Databases on prices and citations in all disciplines
    • Journalprices.com     Preston McAfee and I, with the   assistance of Vera te Velda,  have assembled a database that records  price per article,   price per citation, and for-profit status of about 7000 academic journals in all disciplines and classifies them  as "good, medium, or bad buys".
    • Eigenfactor.org  I have been working with Carl Bergstrom, Jevin West, and Ben Althauser of the University of Washington, using a Google-like algorithm  to construct recursively  weighted citation scores for more than 20,000 journals, newspapers, and other media. 
    Will the problem of overpriced commercial journals be less severe, as  we move from print access  to electronic journals?  What should the role of university libraries be in all this? 

    I have pointed out before that by far the most expensive journals in economics are two journals published by Emerald Press.  See my discussion of the  P.T. Barnum List.  A librarian at Cornell has discovered some even more remarkable wool that this publisher has been able to pull over gullible eyes.  

    Some professional societies whose journals had been captured and overpriced by commercial publishers have broken away from these publishers and started new competing journals.   There is also a growing number of interesting new reasonably priced (and sometimes free) electronic journals. 
It is in your interest to put all of your papers on the web so that all can access them.  Some tips on how to do this.