A series of occasional posts looking at major publishers and
their role and stance on Open Access. Wiley are a very big publisher for STM
with over 1500 journals and they have recently begun publishing wholly open
access journals as part of their Wiley Open Access series. They also have
OnlineOpen which allows researchers to make articles in ‘subscription’ journals
open access by paying an article processing charge which is usually met by a
funder or institution. So Wiley are a great publisher. But are they really?
I would venture that if you were to ask any repository
manager or open access advocate about the publisher they most have problems
with Wiley rather than Elsevier would come out top of the list. Why? Unlike
Elsevier, Wiley have never allowed an earlier version of a paper e.g author accepted manuscript to be
deposited in an institutional repository, not even with an embargo. Any
information about making a version available would be met by ‘you need to check
what the author contract states’, the few times we did manage to locate this
contract it would state no but you could ask the publisher at which point they
would again say no. However now that RCUK have put into place their new open
access policy which requires all funded research to be made open Wiley have
embraced an idea of open access as long as you give them money.
Enquiries as to whether an author who does not have RCUK
funding or access to funds could make an earlier version (author accepted
manuscript) available were greeted with a resounding no. The argument that
Wiley and others have made is that making earlier versions available would
damage their business but yet they also argue that their final published
version adds considerable value to the research, if that is the case why would
an earlier version damage their business if the final published version is so
much better?
Wiley will continue to publish many articles and many
journals and while I wish our academics wouldn’t publish with them or would try
to retain copyright it’s not gonna happen but Wiley are not interested in open access
for the sake of disseminating and maximising scholarly knowledge but only in open access as
another revenue stream.
