A formal study of co-opetition in scholarly publishing

In this article, we model and study a cooperative peer-review scenario in scholarly publishing. In this scenario, the peer-reviewed journals cooperate in the necessary investment for the peer-review system. However, the final decision on what to publish in each journal would rest with the journal's editor, and the journals still compete in their quality standards for accepting papers. This simultaneously cooperative and competitive relationship between peer-reviewed journals is co-opetition in scholarly publishing. From the comparison between a benchmark scenario of competition between journals and a cooperative peer-review setting, we find that by sharing the cost of providing a common peer-review system, the peer-reviewed journals could offer a higher review quality in the manuscript evaluation process than they would otherwise be able to achieve individually. Furthermore, we find the conditions under which the competing academic journals using cooperative peer review could increase their expected quality levels, their standards for accepting articles, and their peer-review quality, which establishes the benefit from co-opetition between peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, a threshold cost-sharing factor exists above which the benefit from cooperative peer review disappears.