Why I will never publish with Wiley again
So anyone who knows me knows that I’m not the hugest fan of large, commercial publishers, and for a variety of reasons. I want to tell you of a recent experience though with Wiley, one of the most prominent (profiteering) research publishers out there. This experience, in combination with numerous other factors, was so infuriating, that I considered launching a ‘Cost of Knowledge‘ style boycott against them for it. Instead, I’m just going to lay out the account, make some suggestions, and let you all make your own decisions.
Recently, I published a large chunk of my PhD research with a Wiley journal, the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Nothing too ground-breaking, but a loooot of work. It’s Open Access, of course, and I was charged $3600 for the privilege of them making a PDF for me, and a nice bit of journal branding. Thanks, Wiley. As Wiley make around a 40% profit margin, about $1440 of this fee went straight to their lucky shareholders, which must explain that nice, warm feeling you get when paying..
Here are the three main levels of frustration during the publication of this paper.
The peer review process
Peer review is designed to test the validity of your research and suggest ways in which it might be improved. In the case of this paper, it took around 3 months for me to receive about 5 lines of text from an single anonymous referee, that contributed extremely little to the content. It did not review my data, my analyses, my conclusions, my discussions. It was not what I expect of a thorough peer review process. I cannot publicise the review itself or my response, and realise I am sort of shooting myself in the foot by saying I don’t think my research was appropriately tested (read it and see for yourself though, all the data etc. is open), but this was not what I deem to be a sufficiently rigorous process. One can only imagine how often this is the case for published papers. My apologies here to the referee who I imagine did their best, but this is a problem when you have a closed, anonymous system, in which editorial decisions are based often on incomplete information. The paper was accepted almost exactly as it was originally submitted on January 19th.
The production
After acceptance is when things get really bad. The proofing stage was a mess. I had to go through a series of tedious back and forths with the production team to simply resolve discrepancies in line spacing in a table. We’re building machines to recreate the fucking universe, and this publisher can’t figure out how to resolve a line spacing issue in a table. I mean, come on. All I could think of was why am I putting myself through this? What’s the point? What is this helping to accelerate? And why am I paying $3600 for this??
Now, this particular journal does ‘Early View’ publication, in which a paper is made available online before it is put into a bi-monthly issue. Which is great. But the weird thing about this journal is that it no longer prints issues, and is online only. So why do issues exist? I have no idea. To preserve some sense that the journal still matters, and has to hang on to its paper legacy in order to have any prestige?
Whatever the reason, this is actually very harmful to publication times. In our paper, we identify a new genus of extinct crocodyliform. The Production Editor informed me that because of this, the ‘Early View’ option would not be available because of the rules regarding the formal naming of new organisms. This is important, because when you give priority to a named species, it is usually the author followed by the date of naming. So, for example, it would be Sabresuchus (Tennant et al. 2016) in this case. But also this can create conflict if the early view version is published in 2016, but not formally put into an issue (remember, which is not needed for online only journals) until 2017. The production editor told me this conflict would probably not happen due to the length of the backlog (that again exists for no reason apart from the arbitrary division into digital only issues), but that the publication would still need to be delayed by at least 3 months just to be on the safe side.
Fantastic.
The publication
Around 3 months after this decision was made, a colleague of mine published another paper in which the taxonomic changes he made were essentially of the same sort. The major difference though was that this was published in the ‘Early View’ format, so I was like what’s the deal with that? It was exactly the same as what I had done, with an old specimen being transferred to a new genus, and with that genus being given a new ZooBank LSID as is required by our profession (this was was clearly given in our paper too).
So why the difference in publishing times? Why had I waited 3 months, delaying release of this research, delaying re-use of this work, and my being able to take credit for it at a crucial time in my career (I submitted my thesis last week..). Well, I asked the Production Editor. They said that the difference was because I hadn’t provided an LSID in my paper. Which I had. And was pretty obviously right there where it should have been. Oops.
Most annoyingly, why wasn’t I told 3 months ago that this was the reason for the delay? I could have simply told them they’d made a mistake (although why this is my job is beyond me..), and I could have had a substantial piece of research published three months earlier. Do you know what I was told? Sorry, and here it is published. It took no time for the publication to happen (literally minutes), and took three months to delay it for no reason. It was finally published on July 13th. So almost 7 months after acceptance, and 11 months after submission. What did I get for this? A publication, a brand, and an impact factor, all of which add nothing to the research content. Some html, which I could have made myself in no time. Some xml, which is quite nice for machines. A PDF which would have taken 5 seconds to make in Word. Wiley got $3600 of taxpayers money for this. Do you think that is in any way a fair trade? I got a shit deal, zero value added, major delays to my work and career, and a dent in taxpayers funds in exchange for nothing but raw profiteering and inefficiency from Wiley.
Just put yourself in my shoes. I want to stay in academia. That’s why I’ve strived to publish as much as possible in order to give myself the best possible chance to remain, because I want to disrupt the system from within. This has set me back. By how much, I cannot tell, but it must have, because publications count.
So what next?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now. There was no reason for me or any of my colleagues to choose this journal now over, for example, PeerJ. I knew this before submission, so sorry to Pete and Jason and the PeerJ team for not putting my trust in you again. And sorry to those who fund me for wasting your funds inefficiently. I made the wrong choice, and will learn from it, and hope others will too.
Some things you can do as researchers:
- Think carefully about which journal you are submitting to and why. This will rarely be a black and white choice, but think deeply about who it is you’re publishing for and why.
- Question publishers and their practices. Call them out for bad practices, and challenge them publicly. We’re paying literally billions every year for these services, and they constantly let us down, over and over again. It is unacceptable that we allow knowledge to be held ransom by corporate entities in exchange for this level of shoddiness.
Some things Wiley and the ZJLS can do:
- The ZJLS should cancel their contract with Wiley immediately. They are profiteering by providing poor quality and inefficient systems and delaying the publication of research. Please consider switching to a new, more efficient, and open publishing platform such as Ubiquity Press.
- The ZJLS should realise that by aiding Wiley in their mission to achieve 40% profit margins, this runs almost opposite to their mission as a learned society in making zoological and taxonomic research more of a public good.
- Wiley. Be more clear about your Editorial and production processes. Most of these issues could have been avoided with better communications, and more transparency about the process. I feel utterly let down, and will be advising my colleagues to avoid your journals in the future.
Does anyone else have a similar disaster story from a publisher? I’d gladly post it as a guest blog on this site, or just let us know in the comments. Thanks for making it all the way to the end!
Cat tax.
I don’t have a disaster like this – but I have recently had a paper turned on grounds of space. Which is frankly incredible, b/c the internet. The publication process is going to look very different in a few years, and our conservatism as scientists is a serious problem facilitating badly-needed change.
Yep, I still don’t understand this too much. I mean, there are additional costs associated with typesetting and copy-editing that come with longer manuscripts, but this should never be a reason to reject a paper.
Interesting story, thanks for sharing. Had you ever published with a Wiley journal before? If so, what was your experience with those journals? I have published a few papers at different Wiley journals and always found them to be great, compared to some other publishers. In fact, my most frustrating publishing experience to date was at one of the Plos journals. And my most frustrating submission experiences have been at journals that are not part of the Wiley/Springer/Elsevier camps. I assume that the big publishing houses assign particular staff to particular journals, so I wonder how much our bad experiences are to do with individual journals rather than the company as a whole?
I have! With the same journal before, and then a much ‘higher impact’ one (Biological Reviews), and also with the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. They happen to have a lot of specialist journals in our field, sadly. With the others it’s actually been a good experience, it’s just with the ZJLS here that I seem to encounter issues. And for the price tag, it’s completely unacceptable.
I tried to justify my journal choices before here: https://fossilsandshit.com/2016/04/04/why-did-i-choose-those-journals-to-publish-in/ Here’s what I wrote about this article in particular:
“A highly specialised article about fossil crocodilian taxonomy (atoposaurids, for regular readers!). This journal also has unlimited page lengths for submissions. Why did I choose this instead of PeerJ? The subject speciality, I think. Was it worth it? Nope. Especially as Imperial College have a deal with PeerJ for free publications. Seeing as I knew how much it would cost, this was a bad choice.”
I think you touch on a really important point though. No publisher is perfect, and no journal is either. My best experience has been with PeerJ by a long shot, then Nature Communications. The real question is how does the experience vary with how much they charge us for it.
The interesting thing to me here is: what were the considerations made that ended up in you deciding to publish with Wiley instead of PeerJ? That’s something that could be interesting to e.g. PeerJ, in order to help them attract publications. If someone like you already doesn’t publish there, what chances do they have with academics who don’t care about such issues? (I know you said “no reason”, but I can hardly believe it was just a coin flip 🙂
I think it was pretty much 50/50. Both allow unlimited length (it’s a big paper). PeerJ is cheaper, but the ZJLS is more specialist. See my comment above for a bit more justification on this – I didn’t do a good job.
In hindsight, the only thing is readership and branding. The latter shouldn’t matter, and I can generate the first one myself.
Thanks for sharing Jon – let’s hope outfits like PeerJ will be able to attain the same readership so authors don’t have to be burdened with that in the future.
Absolutely! It’s our job to help convince our colleagues of the benefits too 🙂
Could the question of readership be more perception, than reality? What evidence is there that PeerJ does or doesn’t ALREADY have the same discoverability as the Wiley journal?
I think so, yes. At least in our field, it’s small enough that you can pick up every new bit of research that you need to. Looking at my first publication with you, it’s got 6 citations already (though only 4 from your metrics) and almost 4,000 views in about 2 years. That’s not bad, seeing as it’s a very specialist paper!
So I don’t have any evidence at all. Like I’ve mentioned, I think it was a bad choice on my behalf. I can’t remember every factor that went into the decision, but I should have pushed harder for you guys. Yay hindsight..
(Accidentally submitted – here’s another comment to enable email notification of replies – sorry.)
I’ve also experienced a lot of low quality peer review. However, unlike you I have no reason not to complain about it and I did so at https://medium.com/@OmnesRes/has-peer-review-hit-rock-bottom-b8d6cd94c07b
Agree with you about Wiley’s cost and value (or lack thereof), however in my experience no one publisher or type of publisher has cornered the market on shoddy peer review. Ludicrous delays occur at not-for-profits; one editor I knew talked about moving to an outfit like Wiley because they were 5 years behind in publishing accepted articles in completed issues. A group I was part of submitted an article to a not-for-profit; our understanding is it was sent for peer review. When we inquired about progress two years later (we were all that busy in the meantime), we did not get any response. I object to PLOS ONE and others attempt to fully automated peer review and reduce review to a series of forced-choice questions and communicate with reviewers via a two-layer impersonal “do-not-reply” email process; I am unofficially boycotting PLOS ONE. What to do? I think we should all move to an arXiv style automatic posting of preprints so that the often silly business of peer review for career brownie points does minimum damage to actually advancing our knowledge, as an interim step towards more radical change in conducting and sharing research. Thank you for sharing your experience, John.
Hi Heather,
Thanks for this comment, it’s great to have your experience and insight here! In terms of what to do, I totally agree with simply overlaying peer review onto the arXiv and other preprint servers. I actually wrote a bit about this for ScienceOpen, as that’s one of the functions we can do there: http://blog.scienceopen.com/2016/04/what-if-you-could-peer-review-the-arxiv/ Would love any thoughts on that! 🙂
Jon
I contributed a chapter to the Wiley book “Advanced Characterization Techniques for Thin-Film Solar Cells”. It contains 8 figures, four of which are duplicates in the book (not the final proof!), and — you anticipated correctly — four others of which are missing. Besides, they were unable to include my vector images and used bitmaps with visible pixels instead.
We have paid 200 hundred dollars for manuscipt submission in Southern Economic Journal and the editor rejected it immediately without sending it to outside reviewers. I wrote to the editor to refund as Article Processing Charges (APCs) is appopriate for manuscripts that are accepted for publication by our external editors following peer review. But the editor did not accept paying back and even not answer my further mails.
In this circumstances it doesn’t seem fair to me and in accordance with academic ethics to object to refund.What do you think?
That sounds like daylight robbery, frankly. I would take it up with someone higher up at Wiley, or perhaps even the Committee on Publication Ethics if needed. Outrageous behaviour, and yes, totally unethical.
Congratulations, I totally agree with you and I have a question. Is it possible that research papers can be published in Latindex, Scielo journals that are open access? Although a large part of them are published in Spanish or Portuguese.
I had also multiple problems with my proofs from a wiley journal. They introduced multiple errors in my reference list (missing authors, changed the whole structure, inconsistent use of italics, missing second brackets, order of references etc. ) and multiple errors in spacing of the document. After I have corrected them, I asked for a second proof because I was doubtful. Again new and old mistakes in the manuscript, which I corrected again. This took me a lot of time and the best thing is that they gave me a deadline to notify if I have any further corrections of basically a few hours. I was really upset.
I like your advice. You are absolutely right. there are a lot of benefits to publishing. According to my, IJISRT is one of the famous research Papers Sites.