Free Labor for Costly Journals?

There is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses. This price difference does not reflect a difference in quality. The six most-cited economics journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index are all nonprofit journals, and their library subscription prices average about 180 per year. Only five of the 20 most-cited journals are owned by commercial publishers, and the average price of these five journals is about 1660 per year. Tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost-effectiveness for the ten most-cited nonprofit journals and the ten most-cited journals owned by commercial presses. The average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about 16 times as high as for the nonprofit journals. In Tables 1 and 2, the first column shows the year 2001 library subscription price and the second column shows the price per page (calculated by dividing year 2001 price by the number of pages published in the year 2000). The third column reports the price per citation. This is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that articles in this journal were cited in 1998, as recorded by the Social Science Citation Index. The fourth column, price per recent citation, is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that the 1996 and 1997 volumes of the journal were cited in 1998. The citation rank is found by ranking journals according to the number of times that this journal was cited in 1998. The differences in prices and cost-effectiveness between nonprofit and commercial journals are similar for less prestigious journals. I have assembled a data