No deal situation with Wiley
For over a year, swissuniversities has been negotiating with the publisher Wiley for a new Read&Publish agreement. The negotiations were discontinued in March 2025.
With the negotiations with major academic publishers, swissuniversities is pursuing the goal of facilitating open access to research results and making scholarly publications financed with public funds freely accessible on the Internet. The recently revised Open Access strategy states that Swiss higher education institutions are committed to ensuring the financial sustainability of academic publishing and stabilise reasonable price levels.
No solution was found
In the negotiations with Wiley, these aims could not be reached sufficiently. Although the latest offer submitted by Wiley contains interesting elements and incremental improvements, it proposes a price per article that is substantially higher than in other European countries.
As a compromise offer to Wiley from swisuniversities was not accepted, the negotiations were discontinued in March 2025. Nevertheless, swissuniversities remains interested in a reliable relationship with the major academic publishers and simple reading and publication options and is willing to resume negotiations on the basis of the compromise offer.
No Read&Publish agreement with Wiley – implications on UZH researchers
Reading access
Reading access to the current 2025 volumes of the journals is expected to be deactivated by the publisher. As soon as the access will be deactivated, the following access rights will be available:
Articles published until the end of 2024,
Content to which UZH has permanent access rights,
E-books and databases of the publisher - they are not part of the negotiations and remain accessible.
Alternative access and ordering methods
We have put together some alternatives that members of UZH and the affiliated university hospitals can use to access the articles they need. Browser extensions and search engines that help you find Open Access versions can be found on our website: No Access? Your Options
In addition, the interlibrary loan service of the UB and the ZB is available to you free of charge for articles in Wiley journals if the desired content can no longer be accessed. Information on this can be found on the above-mentioned page.
Alternative Open Access publishing - the green route as a free alternative
We recommend that authors first publish their articles as ‘closed access’ and then upload the accepted manuscript version to ZORA . After the embargo period, the article becomes freely accessible. This Green Open Access option (self-archiving) enables free secondary publication of the accepted version without additional fees. Here you can find
further assistance on publishing contracts and
details of Wiley's conditions
Due to the no deal situation, publishing fees are not covered by the agreement anymore.
If you have any questions about Open Access publishing, please contact our Open Science Services team: oa@ub.uzh.ch
Negotiating delegation from swissuniversities
swissuniversities is endeavouring to conclude an agreement with Wiley if the offer fulfils the negotiation mandate, particularly with regard to the price. On the swissuniversities website you can find more
information on the current negotiations and FAQs
general information on negotiations with major academic publishers
As soon as we have news on the current status of the negotiations, we will inform you on our page Article Fee Funding under «Wiley» and via UB News.