Death to Double Dipping

LERU (League of European Research Universities) has today issued a Press Release condemning the practice of Double Dipping. This is a statement that I was honoured to be asked to write by LERU.

What is Double Dipping? Despite its innocuous name, it is one of the most pernicious aspects of commercial business models that universities have to deal with when purchasing e-content. In an Open Access world, universities pay APCs (Article Processing Charges) for publishing OA content in hybrid journals, and also pay a subscription to buy that journal. This is double accounting, or Double Dipping, and some publishers are being paid twice for access to the same content. Iniquitous. So LERU is calling on all universities and publishers to agree offsets – either against the price of the APC or against the subscription price – so that double payment ceases. A university like UCL pays around £5 million on purchasing content. We alone pay one leading publisher £1.5 million a year for access to just their content. So we certainly do not want to pay twice…

To get LERU to agree this statement, I spent a very wet Friday and Saturday in Milan with the Rectors of all 21 LERU universities trying to convince them of the validity of our case. The Provost of UCL, Professor Michael Arthur, spoke up strongly in favour of the proposed LERU statement I was advocating. This swung the opinion of the remaining Vice-Chancellors to follow UCL’s strong lead and advice. Looking back, I see this meeting in Milan as one of the seminal meetings in the history of Open Access, as we all work to forge a new scholarly communications system.

Look here for the text of the statement.

Paul Ayris
Director of UCL Library Services