Wiley is a publishing company with a global reach and is on a mission to support research, education, and professional practice with learning and knowledge dissemination tools such as journals and databases. The Wiley Online Library contains more than four million articles from 1,500 journals and more than 9,000 books. Wiley has recently launched a content sharing pilot, powered by ReadCube, which should make it easier for authors and subscribers of Wiley’s journals to share free-to-read full text articles with non-subscribers. This pilot will enable author sharing, media sharing, and subscriber sharing.
Author sharing will allow authors of articles in Wiley academic journals to share their full text research with colleagues and a free-to-read version with non-subscribers. A special sharing link will be generated as part of this pilot which will grant access to the article to anyone with whom the link has been shared. This author sharing capability has been launched for all journals in the Wiley publishing portfolio.
Subscriber sharing makes it possible for subscribers (whether institutional or individual subscribers) to share full text free-to-read articles with those who do not have a current Wiley subscription. Subscriber sharing can occur via email, social media, and on any collaborative network that is a signatory to the Voluntary Principles for Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks. Subscriber sharing has already begun.
Media sharing has been designed with a much larger audience in mind. Media outlets frequently cover research that they deem of interest to the general public. What happens if a person interacts with a news story about a scientific breakthrough and wishes to read the associated paper for themselves? This person might previously have been prevented from accessing the paper by the need to pay a subscription cost to read or rent the article. Under Wiley’s media sharing initiative, media outlets can provide a link to the original article on Wiley Online Library. This will give members of the public the opportunity to engage in research discovery and support their quest for information on topics that interest them. Media sharing is not currently available but will be available soon.
Wiley’s content sharing pilot will benefit researchers and society as a whole. Those who publish in Wiley journals can expect their work to be more widely read under this initiative. The ability to share work with your peers should also encourage collaboration and scholarly discussion. Media sharing, in particular, should empower the public to engage with more than just the headlines about a given research discovery. Overall, this content sharing pilot should increase the accessibility and visibility of work published in Wiley’s portfolio of academic journals.
