The Production of Academic Journals

Tenopir and King [1996] have provided a comprehensive overview of the economics of journal production. According to their estimates, the first-copy costs of an academic article are between $2,000 and $4,000. The bulk of these costs are labor costs, mostly clerical costs for managing the submission, review, editing, typesetting, and setup.

The marginal cost of printing and mailing an issue of a journal is on the order of $6. A special-purpose, nontechnical academic journal that publishes four issues per year with 10 articles each issue would have fixed costs of about $120,000. The variable costs of printing and mailing would be about $24 per year. Such a journal might have a subscriber list of about 600, which leads to a break-even price of $224.^[1]

Of course, many journals of this size are sold by for-profit firms and the actual prices may be much higher: subscription prices of $600 per year or more are not uncommon for journals of this nature.

If the variable costs of printing and shipping were eliminated, the break-even price would fall to $200. This simple calculation illustrates the following point: fixed costs dominate the production of academic journals; reduction in printing and distribution costs because of electronic distribution will have negligible effect on break-even prices.

Of course, if many new journals are produced and distributed electronically, the resulting competition may chip away at the $600 monopoly prices. But if these new journals use the same manuscript-handling processes, the $200 cost per subscription will remain the effective floor to journal prices.