The Big Ten Academic Alliance Renews Wiley Open Access Publishing Agreement

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has announced an extension of its landmark open publishing agreement with Wiley, a global leader in research and education. The three-year agreement, effective as of January 1, 2023, grants fourteen participating universities and seventeen affiliated campuses access to publish and read in Wiley’s full journal portfolio, including Hindawi’s gold open access portfolio. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries is a member of BTAA and can share some benefits of membership to the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries (UNCL), reaching faculty and students at University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nebraska at Kearney, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Under this new agreement, lead authors at all Nebraska campuses will be able to publish their articles as open access, ensuring that their research will be immediately open and available to the public and that they will retain rights to their own work. Article publications are free of charge, eliminating the need for authors to pay publication fees.

“The message we are sending to Big Ten faculty is, in Wiley publications, no fees, no caps, no limits, no hassle. We anticipate this will be a liberating message for our authors, completely removing from them the burden of managing submissions, payments, and other administrivia too often associated with open publishing of their work,” said Maurice York, Director of Library Initiatives for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

“The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries membership in the BTAA significantly reduces the financial burden on our faculty authors,” said Claire Stewart, Dean of Libraries at UNL, “That will mean significant savings across the entire Nebraska system. Faculty will not have to expend their own grant funds, and departments and colleges will not have to find funding to cover open access article publishing charges.”

The trial first year of the agreement saw remarkable success, with over 2,400 articles published open access—an increase from 19% prior to the agreement to over 65% after one year. With the extension of this agreement, BTAA is making progress toward its goal of a sustainable open scholarship ecosystem.

According to statistics collected by UNCL, 125 Nebraska faculty published in open access articles with Wiley during the first year of the agreement (UNL-62; UNMC-45; UNO-16; UNK-2). Since January of 2023, eleven faculty from UNL and seven faculty from UNMC have taken advantage of publishing their papers open access at no cost to them.

“Wiley is one of the world’s largest publishers and is one of the top five publishers of Nebraska faculty research,” explained Charlene Maxey-Harris, Associate Dean of Libraries at UNL, “This agreement is exciting because it also saves on administrative staffing costs for the Libraries, while only modestly increasing our subscription costs.”

“We consider this agreement an important building block in our ongoing, coordinated strategy to advance open and more equitable scholarship. This open publishing agreement provides a model we would like to grow and scale to other publishers in this space,” said York.

To learn more about publishing open access, the open access publishing agreements terms, or making your work open and available please visit the library’s Open Access and Scholarly Publishing Guide or contact our IR Coordinator at unodigitalcommons@unomaha.edu.