Wiley will cease using the beleaguered Hindawi brand name, the publisher announced on an earnings call Wednesday morning. Wiley plans to integrate Hindawi’s approximately 200 journals into the rest of its portfolio by the middle of next year.
Problems with Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, have cost the company $18 million in revenue in its latest financial quarter compared to the same quarter of last year, Wiley also disclosed. Hindawi’s journals have been overrun by paper mills and published “meaningless gobbledegook,” in the words of one sleuth, leading to thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles.
In the current fiscal year, Wiley expects $35-40 million in lost revenue from Hindawi as it works to turn around journals with issues and retract articles, Matthew Kissner, Wiley’s interim president and CEO, said on the earnings call. The company expects revenue to begin to recover in its next fiscal year, he said.
“To that end, we feel that now is the time to sunset the Hindawi brand and begin to fully integrate its 200 journals into Wiley’s 2,000 journal portfolio,” Kissner said on the call. “This reflects the now close alignment of the practices and infrastructure behind the two portfolios, and it enables a much wider audience.”
In comments to Retraction Watch, Liz Ferguson, senior vice president, Wiley Research Publishing, said:
We believe that the continued integration of the Hindawi journals into Wiley’s portfolio benefits authors, editors, and the communities we serve by providing a more consistent user experience, delivering more sophisticated technology, and expanding open access publishing routes.
Researchers who submit their work to Hindawi journals “will not notice a change for some months,” Ferguson said, as the company works to migrate Hindawi titles to Wiley Online Library.
The company is also implementing a new submission and peer review system for both Wiley and Hindawi journals. “Ensuring a consistent author experience is one of the drivers for this change,” Ferguson said. “As we integrate the two portfolios, we are taking care to ensure that the characteristics and benefits of Hindawi journals to authors remain.”
There are no plans to change the fees authors pay for publishing in Hindawi journals, Ferguson said. “Publishing policy or editorial changes will be driven by the needs of our portfolios, as usual.”
However, the publisher has “considerably revised our approach to special issues in Hindawi journals and have been operating tightened processes” since it temporarily suspended publishing special issues for three months about a year ago, Ferguson said. The suspension – due to “compromised articles” – initially cost Wiley $9 million in lost revenue for the quarter in which it took place.
The $18 million revenue hit Wiley reported for the second quarter of its 2024 fiscal year, August through October, “is a consequence of the volume decline we experienced as a result of the publishing pause and a reduction in submissions to journals that were delisted, coupled with decisions we took for the long-term health of the portfolio,” Ferguson said.
In March, Clarivate removed 19 Hindawi journals from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria.
Wiley later shut down four Hindawi journals it had identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.” No additional journal closures are planned, Ferguson said.
Since September 2022, when Wiley announced a batch of 500 retractions for manipulated peer review, we’ve logged more than 3,400 retractions from Hindawi journals in our database. In April, an executive said the publisher would retract 1,200 more for the same reason. (We’re aware of over 7,100 in this year alone, but are behind in entering them as they alone are more retractions than we’ve ever seen in total for a year.)
When we asked Ferguson if more big batches of retractions are planned, she said:
We continue to issue retractions on an ongoing basis as part of our comprehensive effort to correct the scholarly record. We remain committed to continuing to clean the portfolio, and we anticipate further retractions following our new approach to retractions at scale.
A Wiley spokesperson declined to share specifics about the “new approach.”
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“To that end, we feel that now is the time to sunset the Hindawi brand and begin to fully integrate its 200 journals into Wiley’s 2,000 journal portfolio,” Kissner said on the call. “This reflects the now close alignment of the practices and infrastructure behind the two portfolios, and it enables a much wider audience.”
The reason for buying Hindawi was that the two portfolios had different practices and infrastructure, Hindawi having a flat management structure with low overheads.
Best just to call them all Hindawi, really, for a clearer sense of the brand. I think that will be my practice going forward.
Unclear if this is something to do with retraction?
It’s really not that hard to understand…
“The mission of the Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent organization of Retraction Watch, is to promote transparency and integrity in science and scientific publishing, and to disseminate best practices and increase efficiency in science.”
The Wiley purchase of Hindawi has been a matter of discussion on this site in the past, as have the struggles of the Hindawi organization to clean up problematic publications (see https://retractionwatch.com/2023/04/05/wiley-and-hindawi-to-retract-1200-more-papers-for-compromised-peer-review/ for one such article).
I welcome Wiley’s plans to continue issuing retractions on an ongoing basis. There have been 8,482 papers that have been retracted in batches.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CWG84ncHW7-7mgzq9EZBoPC6Sw5n9mS6pInStNs78gA/edit?usp=sharing
There is still time to reach five digits before the end of the year!
Hear that? It’s the world’s smallest violin. –> 8
To be clear, this is not an $18m loss, it just means they made $18m less than they did before. They didn’t have to actually pay out anything here, just took less money in. It would help their case, if they gave a total number to reference that $18m against (i.e. was that half of the revenue, or a tiny percentage?)
Either way, not gonna be crying over this one. They played FAFO and are now in the second half of the game.
Looking at the linked financial statement, here are the overall numbers for the second fiscal quarter of 2023:
Accountants may be able to explain what this means, I can’t.
“GAAP Results: Revenue of $493 million (-4%), Operating income of $46 million (-19%), and EPS loss of –
$0.35 (-$1.03). GAAP earnings impacted by impairment charges of $52 million related to our held for
sale or sold assets and restructuring charges totalling $25 million related to our value creation plan.
• Adjusted Results at Constant Currency (excluding Held for Sale or Sold segment results): Adjusted
Revenue of $407 million (-2%), Adjusted EBITDA of $92 million (-13%), and Adjusted EPS of $0.73 (-
25%)”
The decline in Hindawi revenues for the last quarter ($9 million) is rather small compared to the Wiley’s total quarterly revenue of $451 million (revenues, not profits).
They last forecasted that by fiscal 2025, Hindawi revenue will be back to where it previously was and grow from there. That may or may not turn out to be the case. Perhaps they won’t even break out the Hindawi numbers going forward.
It seems Wiley overpaid for Hindawi. They included $194 million in Intangibles and $147 million in Goodwill at the time of purchase. I don’t see that they’ve taken a write-down of those amounts and they may need to. That write-down will not affect cash flow or revenue (only the balance sheet), but especially as they now seem to be abandoning both the brand and maybe their publication strategy, it seems a write-down should be posted.
The restructuring charges they’ve posted already do not seem related to Hindawi.
Better for them was to purchase MDPI rather than Hindawi. haha!
No – it is Elsevier who will buy MDPI.
I’m sure they’ll find away to claw that money back. Will be interesting to see how much they put their prices up next year. They overpaid for Hindawi but every university library has been overpaying for Wiley for years.
Jeff Bezos must be unaware of the huge profit margins in academic publishing. If he knew he would be all over this, setting up Amazon Academic Publishing. I’m sure someone can think of an appropriate acronym for this (currently) fictitious service
AMBEZAP (AMazon BEZos Academic Publishing)
Analeptic ALZABO.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8
“On 6 December, Wiley announced on an earnings call that it would stop using the Hindawi brand name altogether…”
Stop the bleeding!