Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/196656 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12158
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
As universities cut library funding and forego expensive journal subscriptions, many academic organizations and researchers, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), are moving towards open-access publications that are freely downloadable by anyone with a working internet connection. However, the impact of paywalls on the consumption of academic articles is unclear. We provide novel evidence on this question by exploiting a natural experiment in which six high-impact, usually gated AERA journals became open access for a two-month period in 2017. Using monthly download data, and an always-open access journal as a control group, we show that making journals open access increased article downloads in those journals by 60 to 80% per month. Given a per-article download price of $36, this suggests a download elasticity of about 0.3 to 0.4.
Subjects: 
open access
academic journal
JEL: 
L17
O33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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