Journal Prices Revisited: A Regression Analysis of Prices in the Scholarly Journal Market

Increasing prices of scholarly journals have been subject to fierce discussion for several decades. In this paper the authors integrate influence factors of journal prices analyzed in different previous studies in a unified regression model based on current data. Three different models are calculated. In the first model (overall market) the largest influence was found for the size of the journal. Additionally, the authors calculate separate regression models for STM (Scientific, Technical, Medical) vs. HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) journals and for for-profit vs. not-for-profit journals. The first comparison found that the influence of the number of published articles is much lower for HSS journals. The comparison between for-profit and not-for-profit journals showed that the influence of the circulation of a journal on its price is higher in the for-profit segment.