Investigating the article processing charge of journals in the gold open access market: A game theory approach - Yuan - 2020 - Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology - Wiley Online Library

As a promising solution for enhancing knowledge communication as well as alleviating financial pressure of institutional libraries, gold open access (gold OA) has attracted wide attention all over the world. But it is a hard work to fully disclose how the equilibrium article processing charge is established in the gold OA market. To deal with this challenge, this paper firstly formulates the competition among journals in this market as a three‐stage Hotelling duopoly game, which is able to reveal its dynamic and competitive features affected by academic reputation, publication delays and article processing charges of journals. Then backward induction is applied to derive the market equilibria. Finally, an empirical study with 1,346 journals is conducted to verify the credibility of the theoretical solutions. The results show that gold OA journal with relatively higher academic reputation and shorter publication delay could charge higher article processing charge. And the publication delays of gold OA journals tend to cluster together in a limited time interval.