Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

A couple of news items from the last few days show encouraging signs that Wiley, unlike certain other academic publishers, is taking steps to move in an open-access direction.

First, there was the announcement four days ago that they have created a new role within the company specifically to lead their open access efforts. The lucky recipient is Rachel Burley, whose previous job title was Publisher” and who is now Director of Open Access. Exactly what that role will entail we don’t yet know; hopefully we’ll see over the next few months, and it will be much more than a PR post.

Then, just yesterday, Wiley announced that they now provide an open-access option for 81% of their journals. At the moment the terms are not truly open access, but we can hope that that will change — as it recently did at Springer — now that Wiley have someone whose responsibility it is to think about these issues.

(More to come on the licensing issue in a subsequent post.)