Interconnection among academic journal platforms: Multilateral versus bilateral interconnection

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or data mining and linking, indispensable for e¢ cient allocation of attention among abun- dant sources of scienti?c information. Fully realizing the bene?t of these services requires interconnection among websites. Motivated by CrossRef, a multilateral citation linking backbone, this paper performs a comparison between multilateral interconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and ?nds that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be par- tially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or di¤erentiation motives. Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for di¤erentiation motive, exclusion of small publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also ?nd that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-pro?t platform induces less exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.