Judging Journal Prices: A Cost Index for Academic Journals

Journal prices have long been a matter of controversy. Lacking has been any objective information on costs that could be used to judge whether price increases have been justified by rising costs. Using a rare, publicly available set of data for the American Economic Review, the premier journal in economics, this article normalizes costs for number of issues per annum, number of pages per issue, and print quantities per issue to construct an index for the costs of producing this journal. It shows that costs have in fact increased more slowly than the general rate of inflation and argues that the cost experience of this journal provides a reference point for academic journals generally.