Wiley Bills Its Open-Access Fee in the Corresponding Author’s Own Currency

Wiley’s own description of the charge is unusually plain: an APC is “a fee charged to authors to make their work available as open access”, it “varies by journal”, and it is meant to cover peer-review administration, copy editing and hosting the final article. Two spreadsheets carry the actual figures — one for fully open-access journals, one for hybrid (Open Select) journals in subscription titles.

Currency follows the corresponding author, not the journal. The charge is billed in pounds for a UK-based corresponding author, euros for one in the Euro Zone, and US dollars for every other country. The quoted figure excludes VAT, GST and other sales taxes, which are added separately and shown at the point of sale where the law requires it.

Discounts and waivers apply only to fully open-access journals, not to hybrid Open Select titles. Where a corresponding author would qualify for more than one — a country-based waiver and a society-member discount, say — only the highest-value one applies; Wiley states explicitly that they cannot be combined. Authors from countries on Wiley’s Waivers and Discounts List receive the reduction automatically. Separately, an institutional, funder or society Wiley Open Access Account may cover all or part of the charge, depending on the submission date and whether the account is still active when the article is published.

Payment is final. The corresponding author is responsible for the charge, accepted by credit card, cheque, purchase order or invoice (due within 30 days), or AliPay for billing addresses in mainland China — and Wiley “will not issue refunds for any reason” once paid.

Billing by the corresponding author’s location rather than by the journal’s home country is a practical choice: it ties the invoice to the funding environment the author is actually working in, which is usually a better match for where the money to pay it is coming from than the journal’s own jurisdiction would be.

The no-stacking rule and the no-refund policy both close the same kind of gap: a rule that let discounts combine, or that allowed a charge to be unwound after the fact, would make the final cost of an article unpredictable in a way that affects library and funder budgeting, not just the individual author. Wiley’s page trades flexibility for a number that, once it is quoted and accepted, does not move.

Restricting discounts to fully open-access journals follows from how Open Select works: a hybrid charge exists alongside a subscription that the journal is already being paid for, which is a different economic situation from a journal that has no subscription income at all.

How it reaches a specific journal. A society journal Wiley publishes on behalf of another organisation may add its own eligibility rules for discounts on top of Wiley’s, since the page notes that society-member discounts depend on details the society itself sets.

For a hybrid journal specifically, the practical point is that the discount-and-waiver machinery described here simply does not apply: budgeting for an Open Select article means using the hybrid price list at face value.