Interconnection among Academic Journal Websites: Multilateral versus Bilateral Interconnection

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or data mining and linking, indispensable for efficient allocation of attention among abundant sources of scienti…c information. Fully realizing the benefi…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 finds that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be partially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or differentiation motives. Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for differentiation motive, exclusion of small publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also find that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-pro…fit platform induces less exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.