Wiley moves toward broader open access

An important announcement from Wiley about their move to broader open access through use of the Creative Commons - Attribution (CC-BY) license for Wiley Open Access Journals. This is a strong indication that Wiley is joining a growing list of traditional commercial scholarly publishers to undertake serious competition for the growing open access environment for scholarly publishing - as is the title of Rachel Burley, Wiley's VP and Director, Open Access.

While I support the full range of CC licenses for open access, CC-BY is the simplest option for the profit-oriented commercial publisher wishing to be taken seriously about its commitment to open access publishing - important because this perception will help a publisher to be on the list of publishers / journals suitable for those funding open access article processing fees.

Next steps I would recommend to Wiley:

•  a commitment to publishing journals in a format suitable for data and/or text-mining and that will facilitate re-use of portions of content (for example, a CC-BY license on a locked-down PDF removes legal barriers to re-use, but not technical barriers)
• a strengthened commitment to support for author self-archiving to allow authors more choice (not all authors have funding support for open access article processing fees)
• prepare to compete for high quality publishing services at reasonable prices - consider a range of possible future competitors that includes PeerJ with prices starting at $99 for a lifetime of publishing

Kudos and welcome to the open access world to Wiley!