The empire strikes back: Alicia Wise, the head of open-access publishing at Elsevier, tells Adam Smith why she thinks the concept of double dipping has become meaningless.
abernard102@gmail.com 2015-02-14
Summary:
"Many open-access advocates predicted that the introduction
of article processing charges would lead to the
demise of the subscription model. 'That’s not happening
at all,' says Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of access and
policy, who has led the publisher’s journey through the
growing open-access market for 4 years. 'Elsevier is seeing
growth in both models.' Indeed, a recent survey by
information scientists at the University of Sheffield found
that the company was capturing 20 per cent of all APCs
paid by 23 UK universities.
To Wise, it may seem like a long time since academics
began to boycott Elsevier in 2012. Nearly 15,000
academics have pledged not to publish in or referee for
Elsevier’s journals, yet business, it seems, has not been
affected. Even some investors are happy: the investment
research firm Bernstein upgraded its rating of Elsevier’s
stock in September, saying that the threat posed by open
access was diminishing.
Yet in many academic circles the anti-Elsevier rhetoric
is stronger than ever. Tim Gowers, a mathematician
at the University of Cambridge, is one academic who
continues to stir up anger about Elsevier’s profit of
39 per cent, or £826 million, on scientific, technical and
medical publishing. Gowers was behind a freedom-ofinformation
campaign this spring that found that Russell
Group universities were spending more than £17m a year
on the company’s journals.
One of the main complaints is
about double dipping ... According to Wise, there is no connection
between subscriptions and
APCs: they are 'decoupled'. She says
the money coming in through a journal
subscription is used to pay for a
particular number of articles, and that
open-access articles in hybrid journals
are additional to that. It is therefore
fair to charge APCs to cover the costs of those open articles,
she says. In the words of a senior academic at a
research-intensive university, however, 'Publishers may
not be charging for the same article twice, but universities
feel they’re paying for the same content twice.' Libraries are keen to keep the term double dipping
alive because it has become powerful. Outside the negotiating
room where librarians and publishers meet, the
term provokes outrage—the kind of pressure that librarians
need their negotiating partners to feel ... There may be disagreement on double dipping, but
one issue that affects both parties is whether libraries
can afford what publishers sell. Here, Elsevier may have
secured a subtle victory: the conversation has moved on
to how libraries can afford the different ways of funding
publishing, rather than how their purchasing power can
force publishers to move to open access ... Wise and others involved claim that negotiations
between publishers and libraries are going smoothly,
yet in private there are reports of passionate rows. She
acknowledges that people say different things in public
and in private, and says 'it’s not good practice to comment
on ongoing discussions'. This is a reference to a
Research Fortnight story that revealed how publishers
Taylor & Francis and Wiley planned to offset subscription
costs against APC income and suggested that others
might follow [RF 29/10/14, Cover] ..."