The costs of double dipping - Research Libraries UK

"There is an interesting division in the ranks of publishers in their approach to double dipping. Many are engaging positively with the academic library community and accept that the increase in gold open access article processing charges (APCs) in hybrid journals means that they should adjust their subscription prices accordingly. Others, however, appear to feel that it should be business as usual. Last year, RLUK published a paper setting out our view of double dipping ... Recently, Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s Director of Access and Policy, suggested that she was ‘not exactly clear what the term [double dipping] means in conversation any more’. She went further and claimed that double dipping was effectively impossible as subscriptions and APCs were ‘decoupled’ – the gold OA papers in hybrid journals are additional to the total number of papers published as part of the subscription and so not part of that subscription ... As the UK continues to invest in Gold OA it is interesting to look at the numbers and to see if we can identify cases that would fit the RLUK definition of double dipping. Stephen Pinfield, Jennifer Salter and Peter A Bath have published an analysis of scholarly communications spending by 23 UK institutions. Theirs is a fascinating paper describing a rich set of data, but I wish to focus on Table 8 which shows the total spend over 20 of the institutions on subscriptions and APCs across the largest publishers in 2013 ... Let’s take the first publisher listed: Elsevier. In 2013 the 20 institutions surveyed spent in total £14,259,959 on subscriptions and £937,531 on APCs in hybrid journals. It is clear that the UK’sembracing of gold OA brought to Elsevier an increase in their revenues from these institutions of over 6%. The ‘double dippingis impossible’ argument appears to be that these ... are two completely separate revenue streams. The OA papers are viewed by Elsevier as ‘additional’, over and above what a subscriber gets access to. However, if the UK had not gone for gold, these OA papers would still have been published as subscription-access papers, only available to subscribers. The payment of the APC takes the paper out of subscription-control. If no APC had been paid the total number of papers under subscription access would have been higher. And the subscription income? It would still have been £14,259,959. Without hybrid OA the total from these 20 institutions is £14,259,959. With hybrid OA it is £15,197,490. It is clear that this is additional revenue for the same content – i.e., double dipping! ..."