Wiley (publisher)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (/ˈwaɪli/), is an American multinational publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company was founded in 1807 and produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in print and electronically, as well as online products and services,[2] training materials, and educational materials for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students.[3]
Not to be confused with Wiley College.Status
Active
1807
New York City, United States
United States
Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.
Worldwide
- Science
- technology
- medicine
- professional development
- higher education
5,100
Corporate structure[edit]
Governance and operations[edit]
While the company is led by an independent management team and Board of Directors, the involvement of the Wiley family is ongoing, with sixth-generation members (and siblings) Peter Booth Wiley as the non-executive chairman of the board and Bradford Wiley II as a Director and past chairman of the board. Seventh-generation members Jesse and Nate Wiley work in the company's Professional/Trade and Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly businesses, respectively.
Wiley has been publicly owned since 1962, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 1995; its stock is traded under the symbols NYSE: WLY (for its Class A stock) and NYSE: WLYB (for its class B stock).
Wiley's operations are organized into three business divisions:
Controversies[edit]
Journal protests[edit]
The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal resigned over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley. Wiley did not allow the editorial board members to decide over editorial appointments and decisions.[69]
A majority of the editorial board of the journal Diversity & Distributions resigned in 2018 after Wiley allegedly blocked the publication of a letter protesting the publisher's decision to make the journal entirely open access.[70]
Manipulation of bibliometrics[edit]
According to Goodhart's law and concerned academics like the signatories of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, commercial academic publishers benefit from manipulation of bibliometrics and scientometrics like the journal impact factor, which is often used as proxy of prestige and can influence revenues, including public subsidies in the form of subscriptions and free work from academics.[72]
Five Wiley journals, which exhibited unusual levels of self-citation, had their journal impact factor of 2019 suspended from Journal Citation Reports in 2020, a sanction which hit 34 journals in total.[73]
Publication of "Paper Mill" generated papers[edit]
In April 2022, the journal Science revealed that a Ukrainian company, International Publisher Ltd., run by Ksenia Badziun, operates a Russian website where academics can purchase authorships in soon to be published academic papers.[74] In the 2-year period analyzed by researchers, they found that at least 419 articles "appeared to match manuscripts that later appeared in dozens of different journals" and that "More than 100 of these identified papers were published in 68 journals run by established publishers, including Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell."[74] Wiley-Blackwell claimed that they were examining the specific papers that were identified and brought to their attention.[74]
In 2024, it closed down 19 of the about 250 journals it had acquired in the Hindawi deal, after retracting "more than 11,300 'compromised' studies over the past two years"; it had earlier shuttered four journals for publishing fake articles coming from paper mills.[75]
Copyright cases[edit]
Photographer copyrights[edit]
A 2013 lawsuit brought by a stock photo agency for alleged violation of a 1997 license was dismissed for procedural reasons.[76]
A 2014 ruling by the District Court for the Southern District of New York,[77] later affirmed by the Second Circuit,[78] says that Wiley infringed on the copyright of photographer Tom Bean by using his photos beyond the scope of the license it had purchased. The case was connected to a larger set of copyright infringement cases brought by photo agency DRK against various publishers.[79]
A 2015 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion established that another photo agency had standing to sue Wiley for its usage of photos beyond the scope of the license acquired.[80]
Used books[edit]
In 2018, a Southern District of New York court upheld the award of over $39 million to Wiley and other textbook publishers in a vast litigation against Book Dog Books, a re-seller of used books which was found to hold and distribute counterfeit copies. The Court found that circumstantial evidence was sufficient to establish distribution of 116 titles for which counterfeit copies had been presented and of other 5 titles. It also found that unchallenged testimony on how the publishers' usually acquired licenses from authors was sufficient to establish the publishers' copyright on the books in question.[81][82]
