The posts that included the two items shown in Figure 1 appeared on LinkedIn during the past couple of weeks. It is, of course, very normal to see posts on LinkedIn that make claims that are either unverifiable or clearly untrue, but nevertheless the claim made in the item on the left, which has been posted multiple times, is remarkable.
Is it really true that with Wiley-JISC one can publish articles Open Access with no processing fees (APCs)?
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
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Figure 1. Extracts from two posts appearing on LinkedIn during April 2025
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If one goes on to the Wiley Author Services website, one finds that this offer is…….
*…. subject to availability of sufficient funds or article allocations (at editorial acceptance) and subsequent approval from eligible institutions’ Wiley Open Access Account holders.
If a funding request has been approved but funds/article allocations are no longer available when an article has been editorially accepted and an OA license has been signed, the author will receive an email telling them that their funding request has been denied due to funding exhaustion unless other funding arrangements for their institution are in place.
So it is not actually true that there are no article processing fees. The true position is that the fees will, if the authors are lucky, be extracted from their institutions instead of from themselves. And how much do those institutions pay? Search the Internet, if you have the time, to find the answer. Perhaps it is there somewhere, but if it is, it is well hidden.
What we can discover is what it costs to publish if you do not have the privilege of working in one of the institutions that have agreements with Wiley. If, for example, you wish to publish in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (one of the pioneers of Open Access), it will cost you £2200, which is about par for the course for Earth Science journals. Do institutions that are Wiley Open Access Account holders get a cut rate, for quantity? Perhaps they do, but note those clauses about acceptance being ‘subject to availability of sufficient funds or article allocations’. It sounds very much as if those institutions are paying up front, for a pre-defined and strictly limited number of papers. If that number is not reached, a rebate seems unlikely; if it is exceeded, it is, presumably, ‘game on’ again.
An enviable business, but does that matter?
The open letter on the right of Figure 1 shows that it does. It tells us is that Amsterdam’s Vrije Universitait is about to close its Earth Sciences department, with the loss of 37 jobs and the disruption of the education of the 130 students on the BSc course, who will be despatched willy-nilly to other universities to complete their studies. This is an extraordinary step to be taken by a major university in the Netherlands, which has traditionally been, and still is, a country globally important in earth science research.
But what has this to do with Open Access?
This.
The closure of the Vrije Universitait department is part of a wider programme addressing a €60M deficit in the university’s accounts. How much of this deficit, one wonders, is due to payments being made to publishing companies for Open Access? For a research-intensive institute such as the Vrije Universitait, that must be a significant cost.
Just how significant can be gauged from another post that appeared on LinkedIn a few days later. It reported the filing of a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District Of New York, citing Elsevier, B.V., Wolters Kluwer N.V., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Sage Publications, Inc., Taylor& Francis Group, Ltd., Springer Nature AG & Co KGaA., International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, and 50 other ‘John Does’. The allegation is that these companies are in violation of anti-trust laws, and jury trial has been demanded. Ironically, Elsevier, one of the defendants and one of world’s largest academic publishers, is headquartered in the very city where closure of a major earth-science research department is being proposed.
The defendants will, of course, argue that they are simply commercial providers of important services at reasonable cost, but some doubt is thrown on that in the document that accompanies the complaint. If it is correct, then in 2023 Elsevier made a 38% profit on revenues of $38 billion. Not even Apple and Google can aspire to that level of percentage profit , and it is the scientific community that is footing the bill.
What do these companies provide, to justify these profit margins?
They are, after all, publishing material they obtain free of charge, publishing it in journals reliant on the services of unpaid editors and unpaid reviewers. Illustrations are provided free of charge by the authors and, where copyrighted material is included, it is the authors who are expected to obtain the requisite permissions. The publications are then largely circulated virtually cost-free on the internet. Where hard copy is produced, that is sold at prices or subscription rates that are no way different from similar products that do not exploit all this free labour.
What, then, is their contribution?
As it happens, I have some experience of this, because a couple of years ago I was invited to contribute a paper to a volume produced by one of the defendants. Having discovered that the publication would be Open Access and also what the APC would cost me, as long scientist retired owing allegiance to no institution, I declined, saying that I could not afford the APC. The editors, however, assured me that a waiver could be obtained.
It was the beginning of a labyrinthine process that wasted enormous amounts of my time, and that of the unfortunate editors.
The first obstacle was that the web-based process via which the paper had to be submitted demanded the name of my institution. And not just any institution, it had to be one that appeared on a list provided. So much for Open Science. Good science, it appears, is restricted to institutions selected by publishers.
Recourse to the editors, and waste of their time, was needed, just to get past that hurdle, but what I hoped would be the end of the problems turned out to be barely their beginning, As an indication of some of those, I reproduce below an email (lightly edited to preserve anonymity) that I sent some time later to the company’s Journal’s Editorial Office, one of the ‘assistants’ in which was the highest ranking person I ever dealt with who was actually paid by the company..
Dear Sirs and/or Madams
I have to say that never in a quite long professional life (my first publication in an academic journal is dated 1971) have I encountered such a labyrinthine submission process.
I had thought that Kafka was Austro-Hungarian, not [Ruritanian]
But
Having, as I thought, gone through all the hoops in [your] website to submit, I was told that my submission was incomplete.
I had to ask the editorial office why, to have it explained to me, that it was because I hadn’t filled in the bit about article processing charges (because I had already been told that these were being waived in my case).
So I then went through all the hoops again, to explain that I had been told that that they were being waived.
I then received a confirmation email telling me they had been waived.
And an email from you telling me that I had to tell you what you had just told me, and do so by going through all those hoops again
And directing me to do so via a new website that didn’t seem to work at all, but I eventually worked out would sort of work if I let it direct me back to [where I had started].
Except that when I got there I was told that I couldn’t proceed because I was not registered.
[So], since logging on to [your website] direct had worked the last few times I did it, I tried that and it did let me in, so I could go through all the hoops again
Perhaps Kafka was [Ruritanian] after all!
That was eventually sorted out, but hopes of plain sailing beyond this point were quickly dashed. The nightmare continued and several months later, I was still writing emails like this:
Dear [Assistant]
You seem to be ignoring the previous email to which yours was added.
It included a copy of one from the “Editorial Office” sent on 5 April which stated (My bold lettering)
The PDF for your submission is ready for viewing.
Since you seem to have received that email, are you the “Editorial Office”?
If so, why are you giving me contradictory information?
If not, should you not get together with them and decide what the actual situation is, before you send out contradictory emails?
Since (would you believe it), I have other things in my life than sorting out [your] editorial procedures, and since the deadline for submission to this volume has now being extended, I am not going to do anything more with this until I can be guaranteed that the process will be a smooth one.
I simply do not have the time to waste
And, a week or so later, after the assistant had personally intervened to do something that I was blocked from doing myself
Dear [Assistant]
Thank you for uploading the docx version of my paper.
I have attempted to include the information you have asked for, but am unable to find any area in which I can do it.
It seems bizarre that we now seem to be at a stage at which this submission cannot proceed because I cannot find out how to enter ‘Not applicable’ in response to a small number of questions.
[This] is as far as I have got. If I go beyond it, I am told that I cannot proceed because I have not answered all the questions. It seems to me that I have, and there is no indication as to which question is considered to be unanswered.
Well, the paper was eventually published. What did the company contribute? A process that wasted days of my time, and for which they would, without the waiver, have charged me thousands of pounds.
I should add also that at intervals in this process I was in contact with the (unpaid) editors, who assured me that I was far from being the only person experiencing these sorts of problems.
This has got to stop