Wiley (publisher)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Wiley & Sons published Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper in the 19th century, alongside legal and religious titles. Charles Wiley had opened the business as a Manhattan print shop in 1807. Today the same company is known chiefly for academic journals, textbooks, and continuing education materials. How does a publisher of American novelists turn into a multinational academic and instructional publishing business built around three separate divisions? What made it acquire an open access publisher, only to retire that brand a few years later? And how did a firm with roots in an early Manhattan print shop end up in legal disputes? Those disputes ranged from used textbooks to photographers' licensing claims to the training of artificial intelligence models.

• 2. Four Generations, One Name

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  Charles Wiley's son John was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on the 4th of October 1808. John took over the print shop when his father died in 1826. Under his direction the firm changed names more than once, from Wiley, Lane & Co to Wiley & Putnam, then simply John Wiley. John died in East Orange, New Jersey, on the 21st of February 1891.

  In 1876, William H. Wiley, John's second son, joined his brother Charles in the business. The firm took the name it still carries today. An earlier claim to a settled name, in 1865, had marked the point when the business traded simply as John Wiley. Through the 20th century the company expanded into the sciences and higher education, moving away from the literary titles of its early decades.

  Peter Booth Wiley, a sixth-generation family member, now serves as the company's non-executive chairman. His sibling Bradford Wiley II sits on the board as a director and past chairman. Seventh-generation members Jesse and Nate Wiley also work at the company. Jesse works in the Professional/Trade business, and Nate works in the Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly division.

  Wiley has been publicly owned since 1962. It has traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 1995, with Class A and Class B shares. Three divisions organize the business: Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly, known as Wiley-Blackwell; Professional Development; and Global Education. The company employs about 10,000 people worldwide. It has been headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, since 2002.

  In 2008, Forbes named Wiley to its "400 Best Big Companies in America" list for a second consecutive year. Book Business magazine had already called Wiley one of the "20 Best Book Publishing Companies to Work For" in 2007. Fortune named it one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" in both 2006 and 2005. Canadian Business listed Wiley among the "Best Workplaces in Canada" in 2006. Australia's government has given Wiley its "Employer of Choice for Women" citation every year since 2001. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named Wiley to its "Best Workplaces for Commuters" list in 2004. Working Mother magazine listed the company among its "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" in 2003. That same year, Wiley won an Enterprise Award from the New Jersey Business & Industry Association. In 1998, the Financial Times had already called Wiley one of the "most respected companies" in a global survey of chief executives, praising its "strong and well thought out strategy". That governance and reputation set the stage for decades of acquisitions to come.

• 3. An Empire Built By Acquisition

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  In 1982, Wiley bought the publishing operations of the British firm Heyden & Son. In 1989, it acquired the life science publisher Liss. In 1996, it acquired the German technical publisher VCH. In 1997, Wiley acquired the professional publisher Van Nostrand Reinhold, successor to the company started by David Van Nostrand, from Thomson Learning. In 1999, it acquired Jossey-Bass from Pearson. In 2001, Wiley acquired Hungry Minds, formerly IDG Books, from International Data Group. The deal included most titles once published by Macmillan General Reference. In 2005, Wiley acquired the British medical publisher Whurr. In February 2007, it acquired Blackwell Publishing. In 2012, Wiley bought Inscape Holdings Inc, adding DISC personality assessments and interpersonal skills training to its catalog. In May 2012, it acquired Harlan Davidson, a family-owned publisher based in Illinois. In 2021, Wiley acquired J&J Editorial and eJournalPress, a company that builds web-based tools for scholarly publishing.

  The combined business, called Wiley-Blackwell, published about 1,600 scholarly peer-reviewed journals alongside books, reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals. It published on behalf of roughly 700 professional and scholarly societies. Among them was the American Cancer Society, for which it published the flagship journal Cancer. Other society partners included the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing and the American Anthropological Association. Its journal list included Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Hepatology, International Finance, and Liver Transplantation.

  Wiley opened a European branch in London in 1960, later moving it to Chichester, England. It opened an office in Dubai in December 2010. Wiley set up publishing operations in India in 2006, building on a sales presence there dating back to 1966. It also built a presence in North Africa through sales contracts with academic institutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Wiley Brasil Editora LTDA was established in São Paulo in 2012.

  On the 13th of August 2012, Wiley agreed to sell its travel assets, including the Frommer's brand, to Google Inc. On the 6th of November 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired Wiley's cookbooks, dictionaries, and study guides. In 2013, Wiley sold its pets, crafts, and general interest lines to Turner Publishing Company, and its nautical line to Fernhurst Books. That same year, HarperCollins acquired part of Wiley Canada's trade operations, and the rest merged into Wiley's U.S. business.

  In November 2011, Wiley Education Services announced the purchase of Deltak for $220 million. Wiley acquired The Learning House in 2018. Those deals helped make Wiley one of the largest online program manager providers, with 60 university partners and more than 700 online programs. In June 2023, Wiley announced it would divest several business units, including Wiley University Services. Wiley's full-year revenue for 2023 was $208 million, an 8 percent drop from the prior year. Its online program management revenue had been $232 million in 2020, up 11 percent organically. In November 2023, Academic Partnerships announced it would buy Wiley's online program management business for $110 million. Academic Partnerships had separately acquired Wiley's online education business for $150 million that same year. That same shift toward platforms and licensing deals would soon extend to Wiley's journals and reference works as well.

• 4. Going Digital

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  Wiley Interscience launched in 1997. It gave subscribers online access to Wiley's journals, reference works, and books, including backfile content. Journals from Blackwell Publishing had been available separately through Blackwell Synergy. They were folded into Wiley Interscience on the 30th of June 2008. In December 2007, Wiley also began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service. Wiley Online Library replaced Interscience, launching on the 7th of August 2010.

  Members of Wiley Online Library get access to more than 4 million articles across Wiley's journal collection. The library also includes more than 22,000 books and hundreds of reference works, lab protocols, and databases. Content comes from Wiley and its imprints, including Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley-VCH, and Jossey-Bass. The library runs on the Literatum platform, built by Atypon, a company Wiley acquired in 2016. A backfile digitization project finished in 2007 put 8.2 million pages of journal content online, some of it dating back to 1799.

  WileyPLUS combines electronic textbooks with media resources and tools for instructors and students. Instructors can use it to manage a course, build presentations, and assign and grade homework and tests. Students can get hints and explanations while working through assignments and link back to relevant sections of the text.

  Wiley Custom Select launched in February 2009. It let instructors combine material from different Wiley textbooks and lab manuals with their own content. Content from Wiley's Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly business came first, with Professional/Trade content to follow. In September 2019, Wiley began a collaboration with IIM Lucknow to offer analytics courses to finance executives.

  In January 2008, Wiley launched a new version of its evidence-based medicine product under the name Essential Evidence Plus. It grew out of an earlier tool called InfoPOEMs with InfoRetriever. The product gave primary-care clinicians point-of-care access to evidence-based medicine information through handheld devices and desktop computers. It bundled a daily alerting service, a collection called EBM Guidelines, and a reference tool called e-Essential Evidence for general practitioners, nurses, and physician assistants.

  In October 2008, Wiley launched an online service offering continuing education credits to architects and designers. The first courses were adapted from existing Wiley books. Wiley is an accredited continuing education provider for the American Institute of Architects.

  Wiley also helped build CourseSmart, an online retailer that sold college textbooks as eBooks alongside other publishers. In 2016, it launched a worldwide partnership with Christian H. Cooper. Together they built a prep program for the Financial Risk Manager exam, offered by the Global Association of Risk Professionals. The program combined Wiley's existing efficient learning platform with Cooper's own Financial Risk Manager materials. Wiley expected the program to serve tens of thousands of candidates worldwide.

  Not everything Wiley built online sat behind a paywall.

• 5. The Open Access Gamble

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  In 2016, Wiley began working with the open access publisher Hindawi to convert nine Wiley journals to full open access. A further announcement in 2018 added four new fully open access journals to the collaboration. On the 18th of January 2019, Wiley signed a contract with Project DEAL, opening its academic journals to more than 700 institutions in Germany. Wiley described it as the first such contract between a publisher and a major research nation.

  In 2021, Wiley bought Hindawi outright for $298 million in cash. Wiley kept Hindawi's journals under their original brand name at first. In 2023, more than 8,000 articles produced by paper mills were retracted across numerous Hindawi journals. Wiley stopped using the Hindawi brand that same year, folding its roughly 200 remaining journals into the main Wiley brand. The Wiley chief executive who had initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down soon afterward.

  As of April 2024, Wiley's journals received about 10,000 manuscript submissions a month. Between 10 and 13 percent of those submissions were flagged as fictitious, often traced to paper mills. In 2024, Wiley closed 19 of the roughly 250 journals it had acquired through the Hindawi deal. Those closures followed the retraction of more than 11,300 studies over the previous two years. Wiley had already shut down four journals earlier for publishing fake, paper mill articles.

  The Hindawi episode was not the only place questions about paper mills and publishing integrity would surface.

• 6. Legal Battles

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  In 2008, John Wiley & Sons sued Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thailand native, over textbooks he had bought abroad and imported into the United States. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the first-sale doctrine covered copies made and sold abroad at lower prices. The ruling reversed a Second Circuit decision that had favored Wiley.

  A 2013 lawsuit brought by a stock photo agency, over an alleged violation of a 1997 license, was dismissed for procedural reasons. In 2014, the District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against Wiley. It found Wiley had infringed photographer Tom Bean's copyright by using his photos beyond the scope of its license. The Second Circuit later affirmed that ruling. The case connected to a wider set of copyright suits brought by the photo agency DRK against several publishers. In 2015, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that another photo agency had standing to sue Wiley over similar photo licensing issues.

  In 2018, a Southern District of New York court upheld an award of more than $39 million to Wiley and other textbook publishers. The case targeted Book Dog Books, a reseller found to hold and distribute counterfeit textbooks. The court found circumstantial evidence sufficient to establish distribution of 116 titles with counterfeit copies, plus five additional titles. Testimony about how the publishers usually licensed content from authors went unchallenged, and the court found it established the publishers' copyright claims.

  In June 2020, Wiley joined a group of publishers suing the Internet Archive. They argued its collection of digital books denied authors and publishers revenue, calling it "willful mass copyright infringement". In September 2024, UCLA neuroscience professor Lucina Uddin sued John Wiley & Sons and five other academic journal publishers. Her proposed class action alleged the publishers had agreed not to compete for manuscripts, and had denied scholars payment for peer review work.

  Copyright and antitrust were not the only fronts where Wiley's publishing practices drew scrutiny.

• 7. Manipulating The Metrics

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  Concerned academics, including signatories of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, point to Goodhart's law when describing how publishers treat citation counts. They argue commercial publishers benefit when metrics like the journal impact factor are used as proxies for prestige. That prestige can shape revenue, including public subsidies that flow through subscriptions and unpaid academic work.

  Five Wiley journals showed unusually high levels of self-citation. Their 2019 journal impact factors were suspended from Journal Citation Reports in 2020, a sanction that hit 34 journals in total that year. Retraction Watch has reported that some Wiley articles disappear from its journals without explanation.

  In 2020, an entire journal editorial board resigned over a dispute about contract terms and Wiley's conduct as publisher. The board alleged Wiley would not let its members decide editorial appointments and decisions. In 2018, a majority of the editorial board of the journal Diversity & Distributions resigned. They said Wiley had blocked publication of a letter protesting the publisher's decision to make the journal fully open access.

  In April 2022, the journal Science reported on a Ukrainian company called International Publisher Ltd, run by Ksenia Badziun. The company operated a Russian-language website where academics could buy authorship on soon-to-be-published papers. Over two years, researchers identified at least 419 articles that matched manuscripts later published across dozens of journals. More than 100 of those papers appeared in 68 journals, including Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell. Wiley-Blackwell said it was examining the specific papers identified.

  Editorial integrity was not the only place workers and outside observers pushed back against Wiley.

• 8. Pay, Protest And AI

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  Wiley reported a mean gender pay gap of 21.1 percent for its UK workforce in 2017, with a median gap of 21.5 percent. Its bonus gaps ran far higher, at a median of 50.7 percent and a mean of 42.3 percent. Wiley said the bonus gaps were "driven by our highest earners, who are predominantly male".

  In August 2009, Wiley proposed cutting about 60 Wiley-Blackwell content management jobs in the UK and Australia, while adding staff in Asia. In March 2010, it announced a similar reorganization of Wiley-Blackwell's central marketing operations, cutting about 40 jobs. The company said the goal was to improve workflow efficiency. In June 2012, Wiley announced it would close its Edinburgh facility by June 2013, moving journal content management work to Oxford and Asia. That move cost about 50 jobs.

  Wiley is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact and has taken steps toward becoming carbon neutral and supporting reforestation. Wiley's journal Natural Resources Forum received the highest possible "Five Wheel" rating from an SDG Impact Intensity system. Only six journals out of 100 received that rating, based on data from 2016 to 2020.

  Wiley publishes climate change research, but it also publishes a journal focused on fossil-fuel exploration. Climate scientists have raised concerns that this overlap could undermine confidence in the climate research, arguing that fossil fuel extraction and climate action are incompatible.

  In August 2024, reports emerged that Wiley stood to earn $44 million, about £33 million, from AI licensing deals. The deals gave artificial intelligence firms access to Wiley-published content for training large language models. Authors would have no option to opt out of having their work included. Groups representing authors, including the Society of Authors and the Creators' Rights Alliance, raised ethical concerns about the arrangement. They pointed to a lack of transparency from publishers and a lack of affirmative consent from authors. How authors respond to that arrangement, and whether other publishers follow Wiley's lead, remains an open question.