Central to the surge of criticism of Elsevier is that they take a free good and charge for it. What has figured less prominently is that Elsevier sometimes charges twice or even three times for the same free good.
The practice is known as double dipping. Publishers at least recognise the phrase and are a pains to deny that they do it. Unfortunately the paywall business model makes it almost certain that they do.
Let's take the NHS. Elsevier et al double dip the NHS by selling subscriptions to the same journals at all levels. Where they can they sell subscriptions to electronic versions of journals to the NHS as a whole. They also sell electronic and paper subscriptions to departments, individual libraries across the NHS. They also sell subscriptions to universities, to which many NHS staff are associated. As a result it is quite feasible for an academic clinician to have had a subscription to a journal paid three or four times over.
What makes Elsevier a stand out though is triple-dipping. In addition to multiple charging the NHS for subscriptions they require the NHS to pay $3-$4,000 dollars per article to enable the NIHR to implement its policy of open access to the findings of NIHR funded research - research that has usually been conducted on volunteer NHS patients, in taxpayer funded facilities, with grants and other funding from NHS budgets.
Elsevier argue that the NHS is paying for different things - and they deny that paying for subscriptions and paying to archive is double-dipping. Yet Elsevier's costs only occur once and ultimately all the different payment streams are off-setting that one parcel of costs. So double, triple or even higher orders of dipping is the almost inevitable consequence of their approach.
Elsevier are very sensitive about double dipping. They claim they lower subscription prices to reflect any articles in closed access journals that the NHS has paid to make open access. This is an admission that the costs of subscriptions and the costs of open access are linked.
Elsevier's double dipping avoidance list is here - http://bit.ly/ycCyQP - and it is notable that it doesn't include any papers published in the Lancet. This seems extremely unlikely, and indeed PubMed Central contains many Lancet papers. So something doesn't add up.
How much does double dipping cost the NHS? The figure is hard to quantify because Elsevier's pricing model lacks transparency and has little interest in monitoring a practice that the NHS seems happy to permit. But at a guess Elsevier probably benefits several millions pounds a year overall from double- dipping the NHS. In an NHS desperately short of cash enough to worry about.
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