In a move it says will increase “author choice,” Wiley today announced the launch of a new line of peer-reviewed open access journals. Under the program, dubbed Wiley Open Access, the publisher will collaborate with professional and scholarly societies, which will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring quality, beginning with disciplines in the life and biomedical sciences, including neuroscience, microbiology, ecology and evolution.
The journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Publication will be supported by an author fee, payable on acceptance of their articles, although Wiley officials have not yet announced how much that fee would be, only that they will “introduce a range of new payment schemes,” including institutional agreements.
Wiley becomes the latest publishers to introduce an open access publishing model, a field that has widened over the last decade from upstart publishers like the Public Library of Science, to include major publishers like Springer, whose Open Choice charges author fees in the $3,000 area, and includes groundbreaking institutional deals with the University of California and The Mac Planck Institute in Germany.
