BTAA, Wiley renew open access agreement

May 21, 2026

After extended negotiations, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has secured a two-year read and publish agreement with the publisher Wiley. The agreement:

• continues to allow U-M authors to publish an unlimited number of articles in its hybrid open access (OA) journals at no cost (for articles accepted in 2026 and 2027).
• provides full reading access to the Wiley journal portfolio, including perpetual rights — ensuring that the university community will have access to the subscribed content regardless of future agreements.
• limits the number of no-cost articles that can be published in Wiley gold OA journals. 

Because of this limit, authors submitting to gold OA journals must do so by Monday, August 31, 2026 to have article processing charges covered. After that date, authors who submit to gold OA journals will be responsible for paying article charges. Note that Wiley hybrid journals that convert to gold during the agreement period will continue to publish no-cost open access articles until the agreement’s end (December 31, 2027). 

Why the change?

The prior BTAA agreement with Wiley allowed U-M authors to publish an unlimited number of articles in both its hybrid and gold OA journals. The new agreement is a compromise that accommodates several competing priorities: the researcher community's expectation of access to the findings and articles published in Wiley journals; increasing expectations that publicly-supported research be accessible by the public; and budgetary constraints in higher education, especially libraries.

Publishers like Wiley, a multinational for-profit company, used to rely upon pay-to-read subscriptions for revenue from their scholarly journals. Now that authors often choose, and are sometimes required, to publish open access, there's a movement toward pay-to-publish revenue models. 

And with libraries still paying for read access to the paywalled content, the question is, who pays to publish the open access content?  That question is further complicated by the fact that authors are sometimes prohibited from using federal grant money to pay for publishing costs.

Looking ahead

Dean of Libraries Lisa Carter sees a scholarly publishing ecosystem in a state of flux. "We're committed to negotiating the most cost-effective subscription agreements that enable access to the scholarship that our researchers need to make new discoveries and generate world-class and life-changing research," she said. "We're also committed to making the scholarship created here open and free to the public, making the University of Michigan, as President Grasso says, a university for the public good. However, we are concerned that there is little incentive for companies driven by investor demands to keep the growing costs of scholarly publishing under control. And the consolidation of negotiating power in the hands of a few commercial actors like Wiley undermines the ability of libraries to pursue a healthy ecosystem for sharing knowledge widely.” 

The library, she added, will continue to push for a more affordable scholarly publishing ecosystem that makes research, especially that paid for by the public, more accessible to the public.