The Effect of Journal Competition on Research Quality with Endogenous Choices of Open Access or Restricted Access

Despite the recent moving towards open access trend in the academic community, both restricted and open access journals continue to coexist. New journals need to choose their journal types (open versus restricted access), while the incumbent journals may change their journal types. To better understand how the academic community is shaped by journals’ choices of journal types, we constructed a game-theoretical model of journal competition with endogenous journal qualities and journal types. We found that journals’ equilibrium quality and types vary by article processing charge (APC) and journals’ preference for quality. Compared to the case that both journals are open access, a competition among journals of different types leads to higher journal quality standards chosen in equilibrium when APC is modest. Therefore, in the academic community where the research quality is measured by the highest quality of the journals therein, journals of different types guarantee a good degree of knowledge diffusion with a high quality.