Wiley (publisher)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley, is an American multinational publishing company which 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, training materials, and educational materials for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students.
History
The company was established in 1807 when Charles Wiley opened a print shop in Manhattan. The company was the publisher of 19th century American literary figures like James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal, religious, and other non-fiction titles. The firm took its current name in 1865. Wiley later shifted its focus to scientific, technical, and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests.Wiley's son John took over the business when Charles Wiley died in 1826. The firm was successively named Wiley, Lane & Co., next Wiley & Putnam, and then John Wiley. The company acquired its present name in 1876, when John's second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business. Through the 20th century, the company expanded its publishing activities, the sciences, and higher education.
In 1960 Wiley set up a European branch in London, which later moved to Chichester, England. In 1982, Wiley acquired the publishing operations of the British firm Heyden & Son. In 1989, Wiley acquired the life science publisher Liss. In 1996, Wiley acquired the German technical publisher VCH.
In 1997, Wiley acquired the professional publisher Van Nostrand Reinhold from Thomson Learning. In 1999, Wiley acquired the professional publisher Jossey-Bass from Pearson.
In 2001, Wiley acquired the publisher Hungry Minds from International Data Group. In 2005, Wiley acquired the British medical publisher Whurr.
Wiley marked its bicentennial in 2007. In conjunction with the anniversary, the company published Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807–2007, depicting Wiley's role in the evolution of publishing against a social, cultural, and economic backdrop. Wiley has also created an online community called Wiley Living History, offering excerpts from Knowledge for Generations and a forum for visitors and Wiley employees to post their comments and anecdotes. In 2021, Wiley acquired Hindawi and J&J Editorial.
In 2023, Academic Partnerships acquired Wiley's online education business for $150 million.
Emerging markets
In December 2010, Wiley opened an office in Dubai. Wiley established publishing operations in India in 2006, and has established a presence in North Africa through sales contracts with academic institutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Wiley Brasil Editora LTDA in São Paulo, Brazil, was established in 2012.Acquisitions
Wiley acquired Blackwell Publishing in February 2007 for. The combined business, named Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly, publishes, in print and online, 1,600 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals in the life and physical sciences, medicine and allied health, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences.Through a backfile initiative completed in 2007, 8.2 million pages of journal content have been made available online, a collection dating back to 1799. Wiley-Blackwell also publishes on behalf of about 700 professional and scholarly societies; among them are the American Cancer Society, for which it publishes Cancer, the flagship ACS journal; the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing; and the American Anthropological Association. Other journals published include Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Hepatology, International Finance and Liver Transplantation.
Wiley Interscience was launched in 1997. It provided online access to Wiley journals, reference works, and books, including backfile content. Journals previously from Blackwell Publishing were available online from Blackwell Synergy until they were integrated into Wiley Interscience on June 30, 2008. In December 2007, Wiley also began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service. Interscience was supplanted by Wiley Online Library in 2010.
Wiley acquired Inscape Holdings Inc. in 2012, to provide DISC assessments and training for interpersonal business skills. A month later, Wiley announced its intention to divest assets in the areas of travel, culinary, general interest, nautical, pets, and crafts, as well as the Webster's New World and CliffsNotes brands. The planned divestiture was aligned with Wiley's "increased strategic focus on content and services for research, learning, and professional practices, and on lifelong learning through digital technology". In May 2012, the company acquired publishing company Harlan Davidson, Inc., which is a family-owned business based in Illinois. On August 13 of the same year, Wiley announced it entered into a definitive agreement to sell all of its travel assets, including all of its interests in the Frommer's brand, to Google Inc. On November 6, 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. HarperCollins acquired parts of Wiley Canada's trade operations in 2013; the remaining Canadian trade operations were merged into Wiley U.S. In 2021, Wiley acquired eJournalPress, a company developing web-based applications for scholarly publishing.
In 2021, Wiley acquired Hindawi, an open access journals publishing firm, for $298 million in cash.
Wiley kept Hindawi's journals under their original brand name. In 2023, over 8000 articles from paper mills are retracted in numerous Hindawi journals. Wiley ceased using the Hindawi brand that same year, with the brand's 200 remaining journals marketed with the Wiley brand. The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down thereafter. As of April 2024, Wiley's journals receive about 10,000 monthly manuscript submissions, and 10-13% of those are flagged as fictitious.
Products
Brands and partnerships
Wiley's Professional Development brands include For Dummies, Jossey-Bass, Pfeiffer, Wrox Press, J.K. Lasser, Sybex, Fisher Investments Press, and Bloomberg Press. The STMS business is also known as Wiley-Blackwell, formed following the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007. Brands include The Cochrane Library and more than 1,500 journals.Wiley-Blackwell offers journal publishing services for other organizations, some of them are American Cancer Society and The Physiological Society. Wiley, along with other publishers, created CourseSmart as an online retailer selling college textbooks as eBooks.
In 2016, Wiley launched a worldwide partnership with Christian H. Cooper to create a program for candidates taking the Financial Risk Manager exam offered by the Global Association of Risk Professionals. The program will be built on the existing Wiley efficient learning platform and Christian's legacy Financial Risk Manager product. The partnership is built on the view the FRM designation will rapidly grow to be one of the premier financial designations for practitioners that will track the growth of the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. The program will serve tens of thousands of FRM candidates worldwide and is based on the adaptive learning technology of Wiley's efficient learning platform and Christian's unique writing style and legacy book series.
With the integration of digital technology and the traditional print medium, Wiley has stated that in the near future its customers will be able to search across all its content regardless of original medium and assemble a custom product in the format of choice. Web resources are also enabling new types of publisher-customer interactions within the company's various businesses.
Open access
In 2016, Wiley began a collaboration with the open access publisher Hindawi to help convert nine Wiley journals to full open access. In 2018 a further announcement was made indicating that the Wiley-Hindawi collaboration would launch an additional four new fully open access journals. In 2023, over 8000 fictitious academic papers were retracted from Hindawi journals. As of April 2024, about 10% of all manuscript submissions Wiley received are flagged as fictitious.On January 18, 2019, Wiley signed a contract with Project DEAL to begin open access to its academic journals for more than 700 academic institutions. It is the first contract between a publisher and a leading research nation toward open access to scientific research.
Higher education
Higher Education's "WileyPLUS" is an online product that combines electronic versions of texts with media resources and tools for instructors and students. It is intended to provide a single source from which instructors can manage their courses, create presentations, and assign and grade homework and tests; students can receive hints and explanations as they work on homework, and link back to relevant sections of the text."Wiley Custom Select" launched in February 2009 as a custom textbook system allowing instructors to combine content from different Wiley textbooks and lab manuals and add in their own material. The company has begun to make content from its STMS business available to instructors through the system, with content from its Professional/Trade business to follow.
In September 2019, Wiley entered into a collaboration with IIM Lucknow to offer analytics courses for finance executives.
Online program management
In November 2011, Wiley Education Services announced the purchase Deltak for $220 million. Wiley later acquired The Learning House in 2018. This made Wiley one of the largest online program manager providers at the time, with 60 university partners and more than 700 online programs.In June 2023, Wiley announced that they would divest several business units, including Wiley University Services. Wiley's 2023 full year revenue was $208 million, an 8% reduction from the prior year. In 2020, Wiley reported $232 million in OPM revenue with organic growth of 11% compared to prior year. In November 2023, Academic Partnerships announced they would purchase Wiley's OPM business for $110 million.