Encouraging a Free Exchange of Knowledge and Resources to Widen Access to Research and Innovation.

Thanks to all contributors, including:

• Melanie Lehnert-Bechle, Director, Open Access Business Development, Wiley
• Leila Moore, Director, Open Access Policy, Wiley
• Kaia Motter, Senior Manager, Open Access Policy, Wiley
• Stephen Smith, Open Access Policy Compliance & Resource Manager, Open Research UK, Wiley
• Dr. Lorna Stimson, Publishing Director - Germany, Wiley
• Michael Willis, Senior Manager, Researcher Advocate, Content Review UK, Wiley

Founded in 2008, Open Access Week is a global event celebrating and promoting the research and societal benefits that greater access to research and information affords. At Wiley it gives us the opportunity to review the previous 12 months, and the steps we’ve taken to push forward our commitment to open research.  

Over the year, we have continued to support the aspirations of our communities through the promotion of openness, accessibility and transparency across the publishing spectrum. Here we share details of some of our many initiatives, along with outcomes and observations.

OPEN ACCESS

In the past 12 months our open access journal portfolio has grown to over 560 titles, providing authors with more open access publishing options than ever before.

We have launched new journals in a wide range of academic fields, such as Mental Health Science, Advanced Physics Research, and Modern Agriculture.

We have also developed new titles with societies and partners, such as Carbon Neutralization with Wenzhou University, Cancer Innovation with the Boao Cancer Innovation Institute, Annals of the Child Neurology Society with the Child Neurology Society and mLife with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With a further 38 journals transitioning to open access in January 2023 and more new titles in development, the next 12 months will see our portfolio grow further in size and diversity.

Wiley has also strengthened its commitment to the open access transition through transformational agreements, and has now signed 43 worldwide.

Our agreements now cover in excess of 2,000 institutions, and provide APC eligibility for 60,000 articles.

In the past 12 months we increased coverage in North America thanks to agreements with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, OHIOlink and the University of California.  We also signed our first agreements in Australia and New Zealand with CAUL, The Republic of Korea with NST and in Mexico with UNAM.

Our first agreement in Africa, with SANLiC, not only supports open access publishing for researchers at South African institutions but also recognizes the need for greater equity, inclusion, and capacity building to enable the publication of valuable South African research. Therefore, Wiley will partner with SANLiC to deliver an author enablement program that is tailored to the needs of researchers in South Africa.  

Our ground-breaking open access agreement with Projekt DEAL in Germany was extended for a fourth year, providing open access publishing options for researchers in 900+ academic institutions.

In addition to the benefits for German researchers, the agreement has seen a significant increase in usage from least-developed nations, highlighting the impact our agreements have in not only accelerating the amount of open access content, but also increasing access to vital research across the globe.

This year Wiley has published a huge increase in open access articles – facilitating increasing numbers of researchers sharing their work with the world.

OPEN DATA

We’re committed to facilitating faster and more effective research discovery by enabling the reproducibility and verification of data, methodology, and reporting standards.

Our data sharing and citation policies reflect our researcher-centric approach to asking for data statements and data citations in every article, by providing standard templates to make facilitation easier. We shared how our journals are supporting this shift towards openness in a preprint and a peer reviewed (open access) article.

We remain a supporter of the Research Data Alliance, and of similar community efforts that make sharing research data easier for researchers. As research funders become more strict about data sharing (for example, the European Commission’s Horizon Europe framework will require data management plans and open data) we are enhancing our policies and processes to enable and support researchers so they can meet their funder requirements.

We are beginning to focus on enabling research data to be shared (and particularly on FAIR data) by defining standard criteria for repository selection, qualification, and certification in collaboration with FAIRsharing.org and Datacite and others from our community.

Open research practices are adopted most rapidly when policy and implementation plans align, particularly in open access, also in open/FAIR data. We have evidence of this at Wiley (and we are sure other organizations have evidence, too). For example, Wiley Open Research Progress Report 2019 shows how rapidly open practices can be adopted when policy and implementation align (note: Wiley data will be updated and shared during Open Access Week; it will highlight this acceleration across the board).

There is also strong evidence that well-implemented data sharing policies enable and drive change in data sharing behavior. Evidence from Wiley is shown below in Figure 1 from this preprint and dynamic figures and data are available in this peer reviewed journal article.

You can also see evidence from other publishers is in Figure 2 of this preprint.

We have evidence that publishers’ change programs and campaigns do accelerate this and thus are effective; we presume the same is true of actions by other stakeholders.

Our evidence at Wiley is published here for the first time, presented in two charts (below), showing increasing numbers of DASs and report the proportion of DASs that link to shared data.

In September 2020, all Wiley journals have a data sharing policy, and 20% have a data sharing policy that requires authors to include a DAS in their articles. Our goal at Wiley in 2020 is to mandate data availability statements widely and increase that number significantly from 20%; the same is true across the publishers participating in STM Association’s first "Data Year".

What does all this mean about FAIR data?

• Over the last year, Wiley has published more than 25,000 articles that include DASs.
• Every day, researchers who choose to publish with Wiley publish 70 articles that say something about the new research data they created.
• Many of these DASs explain to readers that data is available on request to the authors.
• Around 7,500 or 20 articles daily include links that take readers directly to data.

We’ve also shared new information about data-sharing choices made by authors, in results from our study of 145,000 DASs.

One of the most common questions we receive is, “where should I share my data?”

This study provides inspiration and direction for journal teams and research authors about where their peers, researchers like them, are sharing data – across disciplines. It answers that question about where to share.

Dynamic Figure 3 from the preprint is particularly useful

OPEN PRACTICES

All of us who care about research publishing (including publishers, editors, and scholarly societies) have active roles to play in supporting research integrity and reproducibility. Open practices are part of that.

We are signatories of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, committed to the principles of openness, transparency, and reproducibility of research across eight standards:

1. Data Citation
2. Data Transparency
3. Analytic Methods (Code) Transparency
4. Research Materials Transparency
5. Design and Analysis Transparency
6. Preregistration of Studies
7. Preregistration of Analysis Plans
8. Replication

We endorse reporting guidelines such as those curated by the EQUATOR Network and the FORCE11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.

Registered Reports are an article format involving peer review of a study design before data are collected.  They address multiple concerns, including biases that journals themselves can inadvertently create. Over 250 journals globally offer researchers Registered Reports, and we are proud to publish 50 of those. It is encouraging to see the positive feedback from authors, peer reviewers, and editors about Registered Reports and their increasing adoption across many subject disciplines.

Our commitment to recognition of peer reviewers is a major reason why our partnership with Publons (now known as Clarivate’s Web of Science Reviewer Recognition service) has continued to expand and thrive.

Here are some highlights of the Publons-Wiley partnership – which began in 2015:

• Over 410,000 individual Wiley reviewers are now using Publons to record their contributions.
•  We have now topped 2.5 million review records on Publons – up 500k on the October 2021 count.
• Over 1,200 Wiley journals have integrated their peer review platforms with Publons.

First announced in September 2018, our Transparent Peer Review initiative has also gone from strength to strength.

Over 80 journals have now adopted this, bringing greater transparency to the research publishing process and recognition for the work of editors and peer reviewers. Transparent Peer Review enables the open publication of an article’s entire peer review process, from the initial review, to revision, and final decision, including the peer reviews themselves (optionally signed by the reviewers), the decision letters and the authors’ responses; and each element is fully citable with a DOI. For journals that operate Transparent Peer Review authors are offered the option to choose it, although there are a few journals that mandate it.

You can read more here.

We continued spreading the word about our ‘Better Peer Review’ initiative, based on five essential areas for improving the quality of the peer review process – namely integrity, ethics, fairness, usefulness, and timeliness. The Better Peer Review Self-Assessment enables journal teams to examine what they do and guides them in making improvements. You can read more here.

In 2019, Wiley launched Under Review, a new open research and preprinting service from Authorea where authors can share their manuscript as a preprint while it is under review at a number of Wiley’s journals, before it is accepted or published. The peer review status of the manuscript is updated in real-time and publicly visible, and if the article is published a link to the Version of Record is added from the preprint (you can see an example here). Authorea has seen a comparable uptake in preprints since the pandemic. The initial opt-in rate was about 30% but the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has expedited this and as at the end of July it has increased to 44% – such increase is most likely attributable to the pandemic. Moreover, of the ~5,000 preprints that were posted to date using Under Review since November, over 1,000 of them are about COVID-19. Find out more in our recent Q & A with Alberto Pepe of Authorea, published during Peer Review Week.

Open Collaboration

Driven by new technologies and the pressure on researchers to find new ways to collaborate (to maximize time, budgets, and research outputs), we’re investing in new technology to help authors collaborate and create the best possible outcome for their research.

We continue our partnership with Authorea, which is not only a preprint platform but also provides a tool that facilitates real-time researcher collaboration to write, edit, and submit manuscripts, encouraging cooperation and interaction across platforms and stakeholders.

Open Recognition and Reward

We continue to implement open recognition and reward partnerships and programs to help researchers get credit for their work.

ORCiD ensures credit for publishing and reviewing can be attributed correctly to researchers. When an author’s manuscript is published, their ORCiD profile is automatically updated. When a reviewer submits a review, it is possible for their ORCiD profile to be automatically updated to record this.

The chart shows the number of ORCiDs first connected each year with our ScholarOne, Editorial Manager and eJournalPress submission/peer review platforms.

Currently, around 1,200 Wiley journals mandate ORCID iDs at submission.

CRediT “Contributor Roles Taxonomy” is a 14-item standardized taxonomy that can be used to depict the roles typically played by contributors to research outputs.  Since launching in January 2020, over 170 Wiley journals have implemented CRediT increasing transparency about who participated in the research and the role they played. Uptake has been largest in the life sciences and medicine.