Short answers, pulled from the story.
Wiley-Blackwell is the international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by merging John Wiley & Sons' Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing in 2007.
John Wiley & Sons announced the agreement to acquire Blackwell Publishing on the 17th of November 2006, and the deal closed in February 2007. The purchase price was £572 million.
Blackwell Publishing was formed in 2001 through the merger of two Oxford-based academic publishers, Blackwell Science and Blackwell Publishers. Blackwell Science had been founded in 1939 as Blackwell Scientific Publishing, while Blackwell Publishers traced back to 1922 as Basil Blackwell & Mott.
Wiley-Blackwell publishes across biology, medicine, physical sciences, technology, social science, and the humanities. It operates as an imprint covering a diverse range of academic and professional fields.
In April 2022, the journal Science reported that a Ukrainian company called International Publisher Ltd., run by Ksenia Badziun, sold paper authorships through a Russian website. Researchers found more than 100 identified papers published in 68 journals run by established publishers, including Wiley-Blackwell, and Wiley-Blackwell said it was examining the papers identified.
In 2006, Blackwell published over 805 journals and 650 text and reference books across a wide range of academic, medical, and professional subjects.