Dokument: Competition in the Academic Publishing Market
| Titel: | Competition in the Academic Publishing Market | |||||||
| Weiterer Titel: | Wettbewerb im Akademischen Publikationsmarkt | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=64880 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20240209-095730-9 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Schmal, Wolfgang Benedikt [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Haucap, Justus [Gutachter] Prof. Dr. Budzinski, Oliver [Gutachter] | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | Research institutions around the globe have formed purchasing consortia to negotiate with the academic publishers large-scale contracts that make open-access publishing the default in their subscription-based academic journals. The so-called 'transformative agreements' aim to transform the universities' payments for subscriptions to journals into payments for publishing their researchers' work open access. Accordingly, such contracts usually make every publication from an eligible institution open access by default, without financial or administrative burdens for the researchers. The university libraries process the costs conveniently in the background. Hence, researchers benefit from frictionless and effortless open access, often in established journals.
In this dissertation, I study the economics behind these transformative agreements. I investigate their competition implications as well as competition in the academic publishing market more broadly. I focus on the transformative agreements between the publishers Springer Nature and John Wiley & Sons with the alliance of German research institutions, called 'DEAL,' but my findings are generally applicable. In Chapter 1, which has been published in "Managerial and Decision Economics" and coauthored with Justus Haucap and Nima Moshgbar, we investigate how the introduction of the 'DEAL' contracts changed the publication behavior of researchers at German institutions in the discipline of chemistry. Using a causal difference-in-differences design, we can empirically show that the likelihood of a paper (co)authored by eligible researchers appearing in a journal covered by the DEAL has significantly increased. Decomposing the effect across the journal reputation range, we find that those assigned with the highest and lowest reputation do not benefit from the DEAL. In contrast, mid-tier journals face a significant shift from researchers based in Germany towards them. In Chapter 2, which has been published in "Research Policy" and coauthored with Justus Haucap and Leon Knoke, we study the gender differences in academic publication behavior. We further investigate the role of coauthors in this process, i.e., to which extent single authors and author groups differ in their publication behavior. We investigate researchers in Germany in the fields of economics, finance, and management and how they reacted to the introduction of the DEAL as well as the cut-off from recent publications in Elsevier journals. Other than Springer Nature and John Wiley & Sons, the publisher Elsevier not only concluded no agreement with the German research institutions. The latter also ended their subscriptions to the publisher's journals, which resulted in Elsevier blocking access to its outlets. The responses of men and women to these changes differ. At the margin, men tend to seek reputation by continuing to publish in Elsevier journals. At the same time, women opt out of journals with access restrictions and more towards those with frictionless open access. By doing so, they contribute more to the public good of open science. However, they may harm their careers given that the discipline of economics is especially highly focused on the reputation of the journals in which researchers place their work. In Chapter 3, which has been accepted for publication in the journal "Scientometrics," I extend the analysis of the impact of the German DEAL agreements from chemistry alone to eight disciplines. Notably, I can replicate the positive effect in chemistry and economics and find a slightly significant positive reaction in materials science. In contrast, I do not detect a positive reaction in any other field. There, I only find null effects. Parallel developments in the academic publishing market are a potential reason for that. While the emergence of enormous interdisciplinary and fully open-access journals is similar for Germany and the rest of the world, smaller consortia in Germany have closed transformative agreements with plenty of publishers aside from the DEAL agreements with Springer Nature and Wiley. Nonetheless, they cover journals in the fields with null results as well as in those with positive reactions to the DEAL. However, at least descriptive, suggestive evidence exists for some 'Matthew' effect, namely that the DEAL publishers Springer Nature and Wiley benefit the most from their transformative agreements in disciplines in which they already had a dominant position prior to the introduction of the DEAL conditions. In Chapter 4, I investigate citation differentials between different types of access to publications. I exploit that the publisher Elsevier introduced the so-called 'X journals,' i.e., 'mirror' journals with the same scope, editorial board, and peer review process as their established 'parent' journals. The distinctive feature was that all publications in X journals were open-access by default. In parallel, the publisher continued to offer an open-access option for purchase in the parent journals. Furthermore, publishing in the parent journals without open access, i.e., requiring a subscription to read a paper, remained the most common option. The setting provides me with three different access types -- open access in the X journal and open access or restricted access to the parent journal -- while the quality of the papers should be arguably the same given the identical editorial boards and peer review standards. I identify a notable citation disadvantage for publications in the X derivatives and no citation advantage for open-access to publications in the hybrid parent journals. It does not contribute to the promotion of competition in the academic publishing market as newly launched journals, like the X journals, have a competitive disadvantage due to the lower number of citations. For authors, it is less attractive to publish their work there, which poses a significant hurdle for new outlets to establish themselves as considerable publication alternatives for researchers. One potential way to counter this is through strict publication requirements of funding agencies. My results show that work supported by leading European funding bodies is related to a much higher uptake of open access, which, in turn, may lift the reputation of the journals in which the work supported by prestigious grants is published. The final Chapter 5 is somewhat unrelated to the rest of this thesis. It is a coauthored work with Kai Fischer and J.~James Reade and has been published in the journal "Labour Economics." In this chapter, we examine the direct effect of an infection with the COVID-19 virus on the labor productivity of the individual. We study male soccer players in the elite leagues of Germany and Italy and provide causal evidence that infection leads to a significantly lower performance once the player returns to the pitch. This deterioration is not short-lived but persists for more than half a year. Other respiratory infections do not cause the same effect. The findings have important implications for measuring the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluating non-pharmaceutical interventions as they are meant to reduce the number of infections. In total, this thesis provides a nuanced economic evaluation of transformative agreements between university libraries and academic publishers. It offers an in-depth assessment of the agreements' competitive effects. It further reveals potential ways to foster competition in the academic publishing market in the digital age, as the core challenge in this market is not necessarily promoting open access at any cost but spurring competition. In a market that inherently benefits the incumbent firms, accomplishing a level playing field for the established firms, commercial fully open access publishers, and societies and university presses should lead to market outcomes that lower prices, allow for the rejection of low-quality research, and decrease access barriers for less well-endowed countries to the global body of research. It could enhance scientific discovery, economic growth, and, ultimately, the progress of society. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 09.02.2024 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 09.02.2024 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 28.08.2023 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 25.01.2024 |
