Comment economics journals (Score 1) 202
Given that Elsevier is charging an obscene $1893 a year to nearly every major academic library in the world for the Journal of Econometrics, why doesn't someone come in and undercut them? Well, it's not so easy. Journals have reputations that are developed over many years, and for researchers, it matters that your article gets published in a "good" journal. That's really the whole point of a journal: it acts as a kind of stamp of quality. If you start a new journal, besides all the usual costs associated with starting a print magazine, there is a chicken and egg problem with developing a reputation: in order to get a high standing in the field, you need to get the best quality articles submitted to you; but no one wants to submit a good article to a new journal without a good reputation. In economic terms, it's not a classical market where many suppliers can produce identical commodities. Instead there is a lot of product differentiation, and associated with the product differentiation are major barriers to entry.
Also, the market can only sustain a few journals in any specialized area. There have been some big mergers in the academic publishing industry lately, and some people argue that the industry is now so concentrated that the DOJ should consider antitrust action; see here for instance.
Academic publishers are really just middlemen, and with the possibility of publishing directly on the web, it makes sense to try to cut out the middleman altogether while maintaining the peer-review and archival properties of traditional journals. The key is figuring out how to overcome the reputation problem, but given how dissatisfied people are with journal these days, that really should be doable. If I were Elsevier or one of the other major publishers, I would be (a) making a lot of money, but (b) worried about what the internet will eventually do to my business.
