The scholarly journals market has undergone huge transformations in recent years; print subscriptions gave way to electronic distribution, the big deal (for better or worse) came to be the dominant business model used to purchase journals, and open access moved from a small radical movement to become a core part of a scholarly publishers journal strategy.
It was with a focus on this last transition that Hindawi embarked on a pilot project with John Wiley and Sons, Inc. in June this year. As part of Wiley’s increased focus on open access, the new collaboration converted nine Wiley subscription journals to fully open access titles. The journals included in the initial pilot project are:
Security and Communication Networks
Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging
Journal of Advanced Transportation
Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing
Scanning – The Journal of Scanning Microscopies
Occupational Therapy International
The 2016 volumes will be the final ones published under the subscription model and distributed on Wiley Online Library. From January 2017 Hindawi will publish the first fully open access volumes which will be distributed on Hindawi.com.
This project is bold in a number of ways – it sees the transition of a number of subscription journals to fully open access titles, it moves the journals from a traditional publishing model to a distributed editorial model, and it transitions the management of the editorial and production workflow from Wiley to Hindawi.
So how does the partnership work?
The editorial and production workflow for each of the journals has been transitioned over to Hindawi and the full publishing process will be run through Hindawi’s systems.
Hindawi transitioned many of the existing editorial board members over with the journals but also supplemented them with additional board members. In total, the nine journals have 335 academic editorial board members based in institutions all over the world (geographic spread shown below).
Authors submit their manuscript through the Manuscript Tracking system, are processed through the editorial peer-review process and are published on Hindawi.com under a joint Wiley-Hindawi brand.
Results so far
The journals were launched with a pre-release period in June and July and the first paid submissions occurring in August. Right from the launch, the journals attracted a strong flow of submissions. from researchers all over the world – as of the end of October we have received submissions from authors in over 72 different countries. After the launch, the submission numbers have continued to grow with the journals attracting a total 1,347 submissions so far.
Currently 116 of the early submissions have now progressed through the editorial review process and been accepted and published as ‘Articles in Press’. These articles will become fully published once the final 2016 subscription volumes have been completed by Wiley.
The journals have already attracted a strong international author base with North America and China representing the leading locations of authors of published papers
This has been an exciting project so far and the early results indicate that authors are enthusiastic about having additional open access options to consider for their publication. As this project continues, I will endeavour to share further results as we get more data.
The Wiley logo is Copyright John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. The other text and images in this blog post are by Hindawi and are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).