YESTERDAY, I wrote a post noting that the archives of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity would now be free and arguing that all journals should follow this lead. They should! Why don't they? At Cheap Talk, Sandeep Baliga writes:

What is a publication in [the American Economic Review] actually worth in terms of salary? Bob Margo estimates the impact of AER articles in his contribution to the anniversary volume. In passing, Bob mentions an article which estimates the salary impact of an AER publication. The author Raymond Sauer finds: “The full return to a 10-AEQ-page article in the top journal is thus estimated to be a 3.8 percent increase in salary.” (AEQ means the article is adjusted for page size to correspond to AER page length.)

I found this interesting, because it resonated with something Mark Thoma emailed me after I published my post yesterday:

Journals really only do one thing now -- help us to make tenure and promotion decisions. Nobody reads the journals themselves much anymore, but where a paper hits is critical for promotion decisions. That's where the pecking order is established. The sciences are trying to break out of this, to some extent, but econ is a long ways from doing that.

The curatorial value of the journals may not be of much benefit to readers (who, after all, now have many ways to find out about and access papers). But it seems to be of real benefit to universities, who appear to rely on journals to do their talent evaluation work for them.

So perhaps the universities should be the ones paying to support the journals. Or perhaps the journals should charge professors to have their work published. But it doesn't seem to make much sense to have readers pay to provide this service.