The transition to open access is the driving force in research today. Publishers have an important role to play in ensuring that all findings are widely accessible from the moment they are published to better enable solutions to real-world problems – of which there are no shortage. With higher demand for peer-reviewed research fueled by the pandemic, the climate crisis, and other issues threatening public health and wellbeing, Wiley is proud to deliver more research more openly than ever before.
As we celebrate Open Access Week 2022, we continue to make significant progress in the transition to open access (OA) publishing. In our latest fiscal year, which ran from May 2021 through April 2022, we signed 28 transformational open access agreements, doubling the number of agreements signed in the previous 12 months. We also launched more than 50 new OA journals and flipped an additional 24 hybrid and subscription journals to an OA business model.
Since 2016, we have completed more than 40 transformational agreements, which support academics at more than 2,200 institutions globally by making the path to open access publishing easier. These agreements span 23 countries, giving the option to publish more than 69,000 open access articles each year, and include institutions of all sizes – from individual universities to country-wide initiatives, such as Jisc in the UK and Projekt DEAL in Germany.
Since publishing our first open access journal more than a decade ago, we have made a bold commitment to making more research open and have increased the amount of open access publishing from 8% of articles in 2016 to 35% of articles at the close of its last fiscal year. In 2021, we also acquired Hindawi, a leading OA publisher, advancing a shared commitment to openness in research and expanding the company’s gold open access journal portfolio to over 450 titles, as well as its share of open access publishing to more than 40%.
Driven by this increase in open access publishing, we have also seen increased usage of our research, rising to nearly one billion full text views of Wiley content in the last 12 months.
Additionally, we continue to advance partnerships that enable discovery and support responsible research assessment, including through content partnerships with ResearchGate and Wikipedia, and signing onto DORA.
The journey continues – as do we – to advance access to peer-reviewed research. It’s needed now more than ever.