COPYRIGHT AND ECONOMICS ACADEMIC JOURNALS

Academic journals are used for selection, validation and contextualization of research results. Providing open access to these journals brings a change in their publishing exploitation model. This paper examines the economic utility of academic publishing brands and the platform model (two-sided market) of their exploitation. In this model, copyright is used for collecting the fees on the readers' side. Hence, if these do not want to pay for accessing the articles, the journals should charge the authors. Then, the authors' willingness-to-pay depends on the value of the publishing service provided by each journal. On the short term, the utility of Human and Social Sciences journals seems more challenged by the digitalization than the one of Science, Technology and Medicine journals.