Paying to Publish: Using the Author Charge to Fund the Scholarly Journal

Asking authors to contribute to the costs of scholarly communication through an author charge pricing mechanism is increasingly being considered a credible alternative way of financing a reader-financed scholarly communication process that is widely described as facing a crisis. However the history and evolving economic justification of the author charge pricing mechanism and the potential intellectual property ramifications of having authors rather than readers pay, up to this point, has not been explored. Such a discussion however is critical to understanding the many ways by which the scholarly communication process and the research process are being re-engineered. I begin by reviewing the economics of scholarly communication literature and examining how the tools and metaphors in this literature are used to understand the serials crisis, the event where access to journals has decreased and prices and the number of titles have increased. I argue that there is a misunderstanding of the workings, determinants, and deficiencies of the scholarly communication process in both the popular and professional economics literature. This thesis focuses on one aspect of this misunderstanding – the choice of the pricing mechanism that is used to fund the scholarly communication process. Chapter one outlines the elements of the economics of science and the economics of scholarly communication research agendas and the methodological changes both have endured over the past fifty years. Chapter two reviews the various understandings of the cause of and solution to the serials crisis. The remaining three chapters consider how author charge pricing mechanisms have been used in the past in the disciplines of physics and economics and outline the potential consequences to its use in the present day environment where research funding agencies increasingly seek ownership and control over the intellectual property created during the research process. These three chapters argue that paying for the scholarly communication process is more than just an economics problem and outline a framework for a revised economics of scholarly communication research agenda.