Wiley just announced the hiring of a Senior Open Access Marketing Manager.
What's up? Perhaps this is a clue, from the press release: "About Open Access and Wiley-Blackwell
Wiley-Blackwell supports any business model that is financially sustainable and scalable, and is able to maintain quality and the stewardship of the authoritative version of record. Together with a number of our society partners, we are experimenting with alternative models. In addition, several of our journals offer free access to older content and to certain types of material, such as review articles."
Comment: way to go, scholarly societies!!!
Note that scholarly societies could likely go for full open access at much lower rates for article processing fees on their own. With full OA, dissemination is as simple as registering with DOAJ and making the journal web-accessible. These are established journals which are already well-indexed, a factor that would not be impacted with the switch to OA. Editors should check with their local libraries, as many have free or very low cost journal hosting services. It is probably more than worthwhile to check rates with other OA publishers, such as CO-ACTION publishing, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi.
Almost half (47%) of Wiley's journal revenue financial report (detailed report - downloadable from http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2010/index.html), p. 13.
