Interconnection among academic journal websites: multilateral versus bilateral interconnection

Electronic academic journal websites provide text and data mining (and linking) services. Fully realizing the benefit of these services requires interconnection among websites. We perform a comparison between multilateral interconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and find that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime whereas they are often partially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or differentiation motives. If partial interconnection arises for differentiation motives, exclusion of a small publisher(s) occurs more often in the former than in the latter. In the case of multilateral interconnection, an open platform generates lower welfare than a for‐profit platform.