Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific ...

per subscription for 5000 subscribers (86%
decrease; see Tenopir and King (2000), figure
11 page 266).
However, the question we will deal with here is
slightly different, since we will let quality vary.
Indeed, the data we have concern total
citations rather than circulation or costs, which
are very hard to obtain. But looking at the
interaction between prices and citations can in
our view be instructive.
Higher citations go hand-in-hand with higher
circulation, which should reduce costs, but
there is also a counterbalancing effect on
costs, for example because higher-quality
journals attract more submissions and have a
higher rejection rate. Which effect should be
expected to dominate?
It is in fact possible to have an idea of the
proportion of the total costs of an article that
will increase with the level of quality for a
given domain. Using the methodology of
Tenopir and King (2000) it is clear that some
costs (e.g. refereeing) may increase while other
costs should not vary much (e.g. print).
Specifically, Tenopir and King (2000) distinguish
Article processing costs, Non-article processing
costs, Reproduction costs, Distribution costs
and Publishing support costs. There is no
reason to believe that the Publishing support
(general administration, taxes), Reproduction
or Distribution costs vary much with quality (as
measured by citations for instance) of a journal
in a given domain. The same holds for
Non-article processing costs (table of contents,
letters, editorials), which should not be
correlated with quality.
Some of the two remaining costs may be related
to quality. Article processing costs include five
sub costs, two of which may change substantially
with quality of the review:
• Fixed costs per issue, which should not
change much;
• Cost per page of receiving, processing, and
reviewing a manuscript: these can increase
substantially with the level of quality and in
particular with the rejection rate. Rejection rates
vary much more across domains than within a
given domain but increase with quality;
• Costs of editing and proof-reading articles
may also increase with the quality of the
journal;
• Costs of composition and processing graphics
should be quite stable;
The costs, which vary with quality, thus
represent, following the estimates of Tenopir
and King (2000), a bit more than 60% of the
Article costs, which are themselves one third of
the costs of an article. This means that some
twenty percent of the costs of producing an
article vary with quality. This figure may seem
low compared with the steep decrease of cost
per subscription with the number of
subscriptions. Moreover, apart from costs,
higher quality journals have higher incomes.
Besides the higher income from subscription,
they may charge for advertisement and sell
more back issues and reprints. These additional
incomes may be nontrivial.
Average costs should therefore be expected to
fall when citation counts rise 37 .
In the remainder of this section, we investigate
empirically the relation between journal prices,
their for-profit or not-for-profit status and their
quality measured by their citation counts.
We do this on a large sample of journals
covering 22 scientific fields.
3.1. DESCRIPTION OF THE DATABASE
Many authors have provided evidence indicating
that journals held by FP publishers are
significantly more expensive than journals
published by NFP organizations. However,
these studies are either concentrated on a
precise domain 38 or aggregate many domains
together 39 . As will be clear later on, there are
wide differences across domains. This makes
an analysis on a precise domain not very
relevant for another domain and may introduce
a bias in studies that aggregate too many
domains together (an unbalanced database
may introduce biases). This has led us to study
journal prices in 22 domains of natural and
social sciences.
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