Wiley in the Digital World: Achieving Mission Impossible

In 2012, Wiley partnered with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to create a flagship academic resource in earth, space and environmental sciences. This required integrating all of AGU's data and functionality into the Wiley Online Library. The project posed several challenges. Firstly, the project had an aggressive timeline, with project goals needing to be completed in four months, with just six weeks for actual development. Secondly, Wiley had to migrate existing content, comprised of 160,000 articles from 21 journals, 33 virtual journals based on AGU index terms and 743 special sections in addition to customer, user, product, license and alert data. The project also required a search engine capable of working quickly and supporting content search across a range of index terms and special sections. The articles and journals were not standardized, many articles had no issue or page numbers, and journals came in an assortment of formats, including issues with multiple subsections or special editions. Internally, the production workflow from author contribution to the editorial system had to be well integrated and adapted to the new platform and yet function as it did before.

Wiley, one of the oldest and largest global academic publishers has been in business for over 200 years serving both professionals and scholars, with content focused largely on topics in science, technology, medicine and law. With more than 800 partner organizations, representing 2 million members, Wiley operates an online library, among many other platforms, which is housed on custom technology. The Wiley Online Library provides access to more than 18 million documents, including 6 million articles from 2,000 journals, 13,000 books, and 200,000 other reference articles, all supported by 6 million bibliographic references.