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Evaluating big deal journal bundles

  1. Michael A. Williamsd
  1. aEconomics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93105;
  2. bGerald Ford School of Public Policy, Economics Department, and School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
  3. cStrategic Technologies, Google, Mountain View, CA 94043; and
  4. dCompetition Economics LLC, Emeryville, CA 94608

  1. Edited by Jose A. Scheinkman, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved May 21, 2014 (received for review February 19, 2014)

Significance

Little is known about the prices that universities pay for bundled access to the journals published by large commercial publishers. Publishers have insisted that libraries sign confidentiality clauses that keep these prices secret. We used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain copies of the contracts signed by a large number of institutions. We report the results of this investigation and compare the bundled subscription prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit publishers.

Abstract

Large commercial publishers sell bundled online subscriptions to their entire list of academic journals at prices significantly lower than the sum of their á la carte prices. Bundle prices differ drastically between institutions, but they are not publicly posted. The data that we have collected enable us to compare the bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and to examine the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers. This information is of interest to economists who study monopolist pricing, librarians interested in making efficient use of library budgets, and scholars who are interested in the availability of the work that they publish.

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: tedb{at}econ.ucsb.edu.

  • Author contributions: T.C.B., P.N.C., and R.P.M. designed research; T.C.B., P.N.C., and R.P.M. performed research; T.C.B. and M.A.W. analyzed data; and T.C.B. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1403006111/-/DCSupplemental.

Online Impact