Are legal academics willing to fight at all, the current escalating price trends of law journals? Part of the battle can be fought by refusing to send article submissions to over-priced (usually commercially published) journals. But even in the arena of competing U.S. non-profit law reviews it's worthwhile to reward journals that keep a reasonable utility to price ratio (as measured by cites per $ cost). For example, if ranking Boston College and North Carolina's law reviews by impact-factor they both are listed 23rd among U.S. General law journals. North Carolina, aside from having absolutely more citations, ranks much higher on cites per cost so it's a more economical journal and should be rewarded for such.
| cites | cites/cost | |
| 23 Boston College Law Review | 1526 | 6.09 |
| 23 North Carolina Law Review | 2254 | 7.99 |
Assuming that other measures are reasonably equal it would good if authors would look at a journal's cites to cost ratio and use it in evaluating which journal to publish with. And would seriously hesitate to send articles to journals with stratospheric institutional subscription price tags.
Posted by doyle at March 10, 2006 3:45 PM