Wiley-Blackwell

• 1. Introduction

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  Wiley-Blackwell traces back to a publisher that once put out more than 805 journals and 650 text and reference books in a single year. That was before the current name existed. That predecessor, Blackwell Publishing, had been built from two much older firms, and it would later be folded into a larger company altogether. How did a small publishing business grow into one with hundreds of titles, and what led a bigger company to acquire it? Years after that deal closed, this same imprint would turn up in a very different kind of investigation. That investigation asked who actually writes the papers appearing under respected journal names.

• 2. Two Oxford Bookshops

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  Blackwell Science had been founded in 1939, under the original name Blackwell Scientific Publishing. Its future merger partner, Blackwell Publishers, traced back even further, to 1922, when it began life as Basil Blackwell & Mott. Other company records instead list 1926 as a founding year for Blackwell Publishers, tracing its roots to a 19th century Blackwell's family bookshop.

  In 2001, these two Oxford-based academic publishing companies merged to form Blackwell Publishing. The combined company became the leading publisher of learned society journals in the world. In 2004, Blackwell acquired BMJ Books from the BMJ Publishing Group, publisher of The BMJ, a British medical journal. That purchase pulled Blackwell deeper into medical publishing, years before Wiley came calling.

• 3. A Deal Worth Millions

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  In a statement dated the 17th of November 2006, John Wiley & Sons said it had 'entered into a definitive agreement to acquire' Blackwell Publishing. The acquisition closed in February 2007, at a purchase price of £572 million. Wiley then merged Blackwell into its Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business, creating the imprint now called Wiley-Blackwell.

  From the 30th of June 2008, journals once delivered through Blackwell Synergy moved over to Wiley InterScience instead. Under the Wiley-Blackwell name, the imprint would go on to publish across biology, medicine, physical sciences, technology, social science, and the humanities.

• 4. A Paper-Selling Scheme

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  In April 2022, the journal Science reported on a Ukrainian company called International Publisher Ltd. That company ran a website, based in Russia, where academics could buy authorship slots on papers not yet published. The report named Ksenia Badziun as the person running it. Researchers who studied a two-year period found at least 419 articles that appeared to match manuscripts which later surfaced in dozens of different journals.

  The report found that more than 100 of those papers were published in 68 journals. Those journals were run by established publishers, including Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell. Wiley-Blackwell said it was examining the specific papers that had been identified and brought to its attention. That review was still underway when the report was published, leaving open how many of Wiley-Blackwell's own journals the scheme had reached.