The story
Founded by Charles Wiley in 1807, in New York City.1
The company was established in 1807 when Charles Wiley opened a print shop in Manhattan. The company was the publisher of 19th century American literary figures like James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal, religious, and other non-fiction titles. The firm took its current name in 1865. Wiley later shifted its focus to scientific, technical, and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests.
Wiley's son John (born in Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York City, on October 4, 1808; died in East Orange, New Jersey, on February 21, 1891) took over the business when Charles Wiley died in 1826. The firm was successively named Wiley, Lane & Co., next Wiley & Putnam, and then John Wiley. The company acquired its present name in 1876, when John's second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business. Through the 20th century, the company expanded its publishing activities, the sciences, and higher education.
In 1960 Wiley set up a European branch in London, which later moved to Chichester, England. In 1982, Wiley acquired the publishing operations of the British firm Heyden & Son. In 1989, Wiley acquired the life science publisher Liss. In 1996, Wiley acquired the German technical publisher VCH.
In 1997, Wiley acquired the professional publisher Van Nostrand Reinhold (the successor to the company started by David Van Nostrand) from Thomson Learning. In 1999, Wiley acquired the professional publisher Jossey-Bass from Pearson.
In 2001, Wiley acquired the publisher Hungry Minds (formerly IDG Books, including most titles formerly published by Macmillan General Reference) from International Data Group. In 2005, Wiley acquired the British medical publisher Whurr.
Wiley marked its bicentennial in 2007. In conjunction with the anniversary, the company published Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807–2007, depicting Wiley's role in the evolution of publishing against a social, cultural, and economic backdrop. Wiley has also created an online community called Wiley Living History, offering excerpts from Knowledge for Generations and a forum for visitors and Wiley employees to post their comments and anecdotes. In 2021, Wiley acquired Hindawi and J&J Editorial.
In 2023, Academic Partnerships acquired Wiley's online education business for $150 million.
Emerging markets
In December 2010, Wiley opened an office in Dubai. Wiley established publishing operations in India in 2006 (though it has had a sales presence since 1966), and has established a presence in North Africa through sales contracts with academic institutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Wiley Brasil Editora LTDA in São Paulo, Brazil, was established in 2012.
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Acquisitions
Wiley acquired Blackwell Publishing in February 2007 for US$1.12 billion. The combined business, named Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (also known as Wiley-Blackwell), publishes, in print and online, 1,600 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals in the life and physical sciences, medicine and allied health, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences.
Through a backfile initiative completed in 2007, 8.2 million pages of journal content have been made available online, a collection dating back to 1799. Wiley-Blackwell also publishes on behalf of about 700 professional and scholarly societies; among them are the American Cancer Society (ACS), for which it publishes Cancer, the flagship ACS journal; the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing; and the American Anthropological Association. Other journals published include Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Hepatology, International Finance and Liver Transplantation.
Wiley Interscience was launched in 1997. It provided online access to Wiley journals, reference works, and books, including backfile content. Journals previously from Blackwell Publishing were available online from Blackwell Synergy until they were integrated into Wiley Interscience on June 30, 2008. In December 2007, Wiley also began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service. Interscience was supplanted by Wiley Online Library in 2010.
Wiley acquired Inscape Holdings Inc. in 2012, to provide DISC assessments and training for interpersonal business skills. A month later, Wiley announced its intention to divest assets in the areas of travel (including the Frommer's brand), culinary, general interest, nautical, pets, and crafts, as well as the Webster's New World and CliffsNotes brands. The planned divestiture was aligned with Wiley's "increased strategic focus on content and services for research, learning, and professional practices, and on lifelong learning through digital technology". In May 2012, the company acquired publishing company Harlan Davidson, Inc., which is a family-owned business based in Illinois. On August 13 of the same year, Wiley announced it entered into a definitive agreement to sell all of its travel assets, including all of its interests in the Frommer's brand, to Google Inc. On November 6, 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired Wiley's cookbooks, dictionaries and study guides. In 2013, Wiley sold its pets, crafts and general interest lines to Turner Publishing Company and its nautical line to Fernhurst Books. HarperCollins acquired parts of Wiley Canada's trade operations in 2013; the remaining Canadian trade operations were merged into Wiley U.S. In 2021, Wiley acquired eJournalPress (EJP), a company developing web-based applications for scholarly publishing.
In 2019, Wiley acquired the assets of Knewton, an adaptive learning company, for less than $17 million.
In 2021, Wiley acquired Hindawi, an open access journals publishing firm, for $298 million in cash.
Wiley kept Hindawi's journals under their original brand name. In 2023, over 8000 articles from paper mills are retracted in numerous Hindawi journals. Wiley ceased using the Hindawi brand that same year, with the brand's 200 remaining journals marketed with the Wiley brand. The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down thereafter. As of April 2024, Wiley's journals receive about 10,000 monthly manuscript submissions, and 10-13% of those are flagged as fictitious (e.g., from a paper mill).
From Wikipedia’s article on Wiley (publisher), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7