Wiley's Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly business, also known as Wiley-Blackwell, is one of the world's foremost academic and professional publishers and the largest society publisher. The business was created in February 2007 by merging Blackwell Publishing with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business. Wiley-Blackwell publishes around 1,400 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, major reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals, in print and electronically, in the life and physical sciences, medicine and allied health, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences. Wiley-Blackwell has operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Our online service Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) is one of the world's most extensive multidisciplinary collections of online resources covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities. It delivers seamless integrated access to over 4 million articles from 1,500 journals, 9,000 books, and hundreds of multi-volume reference works, laboratory protocols and databases. Access to abstracts and searching is free, full content is accessible through licensing agreements and large portions of the content are provided free or at nominal cost to nations in the developing world through partnerships with organizations such as HINARI, AGORA, and OARE.
This next generation online service was launched in August 2010, replacing Wiley InterScience. Wiley Online Library features an easy-to-use interface, provides intuitive navigation, enhanced discoverability, and a range of personalization and alerting options. The development of Wiley Online Library does not stop at launch; the site is being constantly updated, and new features and functions are being added to keep up with the rapidly changing world of online research and learning. The new site is built on technology that will enable us to introduce new features faster and adapt to the future publishing environment.
Publishing alliances continue to play a major role in our STMS success, even more so since the union with Blackwell, long regarded as among the industry's best at building and maintaining relationships with professional and scholarly societies. These partnerships confer mutual benefit, with the societies gaining Wiley-Blackwell's publishing and marketing expertise while Wiley-Blackwell receives superlative peer-reviewed scientific content and enhanced visibility among society memberships. Wiley-Blackwell publishes on behalf of about 700 societies representing close to 1,000,000 members globally. Among them are the American Cancer Society, for which we publish Cancer, the flagship ACS journal; the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, with more than 120,000 members; and, beginning in 2008, the American Anthropological Association, in a partnership to publish 23 journals. Another important alliance is with the IEEE, the premier society for electrical, electronics, and computer engineers, with which we publish a co-branded imprint of books in the relevant fields.
Wiley and Blackwell both have strong track records of leadership in important industry initiatives. Both were among the founding members of CrossRef, a unique collaborative alliance of nearly 500 publishers that facilitates scientific research by linking references in journal articles directly to the cited material, as well as providing additional functionality such as a Google-powered full-text search across multiple-publisher content, and forward linking. Wiley and Blackwell have also played key roles in the establishment and operation of three programs—HINARI, AGORA, and OARE—through which over 100 publishers, working in conjunction with three U.N. organizations, are providing nations in the developing world free or nearly free online access to journals in the areas of health, agriculture, and the environment.
Future growth in our STMS business will continue to reflect increased worldwide demand for research information, new products, and the opportunities provided by our migration from print to electronic formats, with the evolution of product and business model alike keyed closely to customer need. Our key strategies include getting as close as possible to the customer, the user, and the transaction; supporting the current subscription base through conversion of print products to multiyear licenses; introducing new products and services that provide both key content and context in a digital information environment; and continuing the development of a robust technology infrastructure.