The economics of publishing and the publishing of economics

The paper explores the relationship between economics and scientific journal publishing in a number of areas by: establishing the fact, neglected by some librarians, that the “serials crisis” is not exclusively a plague infecting the STM sector, but that economics too has been badly affected; providing a more disaggregated analysis of the market power exerted by the dominant commercial publisher in economics journal publishing; considering briefly three academic‐led experiments aimed at improving scholarly communication in economics; comparing the policy stance taken by the UK Competition Commission on scientific publishing and on banking for small businesses in two recent reports and exposing its glaring inconsistency; and suggesting a modest proposal to remedy some of the inefficiencies identified in this paper.