Wiley Joins Initiative for Open Abstracts

NISO Member News

Wiley is opening up access to their reference materials on Wiley Online Library, and expanding the benefit of open abstracts by joining the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA).

Wiley recognizes this step as part of their commitment to open access transition. The multi-pronged approach to open article access has made a significant impact on the research community, allowing authors to benefit from all the advantages OA publishing has to offer. The organization will be taking additional steps to open key metadata within their subscription articles for the benefit of authors and researchers.

The full text from their announcement to the community appears below:

Commitment to open research

We have been at the forefront of open access innovation and large-scale transformation since we signed our first transformative agreement (TA) in 2018. As a result, today, over 60,000 articles are free to read and re-use under the terms of a TA. Early on, we recognized the benefit of: 
•    launching open access journals
•    transitioning (flipping) journals to the open access model
•    expanding and enabling open access publishing opportunities through our Refer & Transfer   program
•    making sure authors could benefit from early exposure to their work via our Under Review program with Authorea

This has led to a rapid expansion of our open access publishing and preprinting program. We now publish over 560 fully open access journals and support 60 journals (soon to be 85) in the Under Review program. We serve a broad range of subject communities and offer authors the opportunity to publish a range of research outputs to help them advance in their careers. This is a remarkable achievement, and we are delighted at the growing body of research that is accessible to the public. 
At the same time, we recognize that there are valuable components to each of the subscription articles we publish that should be accessible to the public and to the research community.

Opening up access to reference materials

As a recent DORA signatory, providing unrestricted access to our reference metadata has become an even greater priority. Since signing on to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) in early 2017, we have served our author community by depositing our reference metadata into Crossref enabling discovery, and allowing for large scale analysis and re-use. We have made the decision, in addition to our partnership with I4OC, to open up access to our reference materials on Wiley Online Library. Moving forward—as soon as the technological development work has been completed—all reference links that are included in a Data Availability Statement or list of article references will be placed in front of the paywall, regardless of the journal’s business model. We are therefore supporting two routes to citation access both through I4OC and on our own platform, Wiley Online Library.

Abstracts openly available via I4OA and Crossref metadata

It is common practice for publishers, to enable free access to the abstract of a subscription article. Open abstracts provide the author with public exposure to their work and encourage further engagement with the research. We have decided to expand the benefit of open abstracts by joining the Initiative for Open Abstracts I4OA. As part of this commitment, all Wiley abstracts will be made openly accessible via our Crossref metadata deposit along with our citation metadata as soon as we have completed the necessary systems and workflow upgrades. The backend development work will take time, but we are fully invested in taking these next steps down the pathway to greater openness. As a DORA signatory, we are firmly committed to the professional development of our authors. Access to important article metadata is one way we can amplify the impact of the author’s work. In addition, our participation in I4OA accelerates research by enabling large-scale text mining and unrestricted bibliometric analysis.