Elsevier open-access fee waived for subscribers? I have recently been comparing publishers regarding their policies on double dipping (charging an open-access fee for publishing in a hybrid journal and then charging again a subscription fee). Many publishers (Springer, Wiley, Taylor and Francis) state they lower the subscription fees based on the amount of open-access articles to not charge their authors / readers / customers twice for the same article.

Elsevier has a different approach. They state:


  Elsevier's policy is not to charge subscribers for open access articles and when calculating subscription prices only to take into account subscription articles – we do not double dip.
  [source]


But how is this implemented? The Elsevier support team was of no help when I asked there. I only got links to the help pages, which I have read forwards and backwards three times already. I even created an account and started a test submission to two of their hybrid journals but there wasn’t even a box to tick for selecting Open Access.

Has anyone made use of this policy and asked for a waiver based on a journal subscription?
@Stephan Kolassa has given the technically correct answer.  I will add that all of this is irrelevant to the vast majority of universities, since they don't pay individual journal prices.  They pay for an Elsevier bundle, and Elsevier forces them to keep the amount paid secret.  It seems clear that bundle prices are determined based on what Elsevier believes a university can afford (i.e., will submit to) and are not based on any formula involving numbers of articles.  Thus Elsevier is double-dipping.  The only way they could prove otherwise would be to have a transparent pricing scheme and to allow universities to make public the actual prices paid.

Note that Elsevier has gone far beyond this and even charged for access to articles whose authors paid an OA fee in some cases.