The Big Ten Academic Alliance has announced an extension of its landmark open publishing agreement with Wiley, a global leader in research and education.

The three-year agreement, effective as of Jan. 1, grants 14 participating universities and 17 affiliated campuses access to publish and read in Wiley’s full journal portfolio, including Hindawi’s gold open access portfolio. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries is a member of BTAA and can share some benefits of membership to the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries, reaching faculty and students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nebraska at Kearney and University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Under this new agreement, lead authors at all Nebraska campuses will be able to publish their articles as open access, ensuring that their research will be immediately open and available to the public and that they will retain rights to their own work. Article publications are free of charge, eliminating the need for authors to pay publication fees.

“The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries’ membership in the BTAA significantly reduces the financial burden on our faculty authors,” Claire Stewart, dean of Libraries, said. “That will mean significant savings across the entire Nebraska system. Faculty will not have to expend their own grant funds, and departments and colleges will not have to find funding to cover open access article publishing charges.”

The trial first year of the agreement saw remarkable success, with over 2,400 articles published open access — an increase from 19% prior to the agreement to over 65% after one year. With the extension of this agreement, BTAA is making progress toward its goal of a sustainable open scholarship ecosystem.

According to statistics collected by UNCL, 125 Nebraska faculty published in open access articles with Wiley during the first year of the agreement (UNL, 62; UNMC, 45; UNO, 16; UNK, 2). Since January, 11 faculty from UNL and seven faculty from UNMC have taken advantage of publishing their papers open access at no cost to them.

“Wiley is one of the world’s largest publishers and is one of the top five publishers of Nebraska faculty research,” Charlene Maxey-Harris, associate dean of Libraries, said. “This agreement is exciting because it also saves on administrative staffing costs for the Libraries, while only modestly increasing our subscription costs.”

To learn more about this and other publishing agreements and how to save on article processing fees, attend one of the University Libraries informational sessions:

• In-person: 11 a.m. March 28 in 224 Love Library South

• Online: 3 p.m. March 29 via Zoom

Sue Gardner, scholarly communications librarian, will begin with a short presentation and then open the session to answer questions.