Previous research modeled academic journals as platforms connectingauthors with readers in a two-sided market. This research used the samebasic framework also used to study telephony, credit cards, video gameconsoles, etc. In this paper, we focus on a key difference between themarket for academic journals and these other markets: journals vary interms of quality, where a journal's quality determined by the quality ofthe papers it publishes. We provide a simple model of journal quality.As an illustration of the value of the model, we use it to addressissues that have arisen in the recent debate concerning whether, in theInternet age, journals should become 'open access' (freely available toreaders, financed by author rather than subscriber fees). Among otherissues, we examine (a) whether open-access journals would tend topublish more articles than traditional journals, moving further down thequality spectrum in order to boost revenue; (b) whether journal qualityaffects the profitability of adopting open access; and (c) whethersubmission fees or acceptance fees are better instruments to extractsurplus from authors.
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