I was often exasperated by Wiley but even I will say that the company is generally not badly led. Like any big company it does have its dead wood and its political rockpools but its no worse than anywhere else. I

I agree to some extent but there's huge value in nurturing local talent you're missing - the future leaders of the company climbing through the ranks - you're just not going to get that farming all the divisions out to India and the Phillipines as is going to happen with this move (not just Singapore which is near capacity for Wiley and apparantly too expensive now anyway). And what will happen is it will all come full circle like we're all seeing with the call centres. The outsourced companies raise the prices and the quality - which needs to be paramount with Wiley - is completely lost amongst suppliers that would before be well monitored by the production staff placing work with them. So it all comes back.. It's a short term plan made by directors looking to impress the elite with a few figures and and to try and appease shareholders that might be grumbling. They have not thought this through clearly as they're not aiming to set this operation up in Singapore as I said - it's India or the Philippines where they have not even began to work out how to build that from the ground up yet, and they'll be no staff in Chichester around to help them do that.
They've hit the very department that's done all the work and made the most revenue - other loss making areas have not been affected for now and neither, no surprise here, have their own offices in the US. Bad decision.

I remember all the Americans boring us senseless with tedious speeches in the atrium in the months after the takeover. We were told that we were 'people first, employees second'.
And now they're farming out jobs to make the numbers go up a bit further. Meet the new boss...

You make an interesting point, Publisher. I admit I don

You make some good points Jason but really are overlooking the quality/communiocations issue, in particular the effect this will have on the authors, and thus in turn, the content consumers.
It's fine outsourcing typesetting, printing even in most cases but why do you think copyediting is never really outsourced? Because it cannot be matched in India, Singapore or the Phillipines. Authors need close contact with production at this point and indeed throughout the often 6 month life-span of a book - you must know how stressful it is dealing with Indian call centres for 20 mins, imagine that stretched out over half a year but it's your life work they're dealing with - not your BT account.. Communication is a major issue and most authors need their hand held tighly in most instances and have a lot of queries and require face to face or phone calls to support them often - they will not be getting that with this system - rather huge, instruction manual procedural emails. So the authors get miffed, don't write for Wiley again (and tell others of their bad experience) and the quality goes down the pan because no central production body is monitoring the suppliers effectively. As a result of the quality suffering and author decline (or switching to other publishers) open access, which is a huge threat, is a much more attractive option for content, which was before seen as somewhat inferiror as people were paying for premium 'reliable' content previously.

Not only this but they're strangling the very department that really makes them any money hoping it will reform and choke up something better elsewhere in a cheaper format, incredible..if STM suffers and more journal subscriptions drop further, Wiley will go under as that's the only thing holding it up (and Dummies, but that has a shelf life due to expire soon). It's an oversight of massive proportions. Not to mention a sad way forward for Britain as a whole lot alone publishing as a noble profession.

I think also there's rumblings of another plan afoot (apart from this top level decision making stupidity) - I think they just want to get rid of Chichester as a location - Oxford (Blackwell) is far more prestigious and no doubt they'll be many more jobs to go soon as they relocate there in the near future.

I think really you're using this opportunity to shine your badge about leaving Wiley here and starting up a company. This is all very well but does not relate to the fact that this decision is a poorly planned adventure that looks only at the short term financies they could save, and not the long term quality and business they would lose. Besides there are many that are not quite at retirement age that are not interested in going it alone perhaps, maybe some with children that don't want to risk all or nothing in such a bleak work climate - and I really don't agree with you on there being more opportunities at the moment for the majority of people either. That's like saying if we take peoples properties away from them it will make them more proactive and grow them as a person, no it won't, it just means they're homeless. You have a contract with an employer and of course they don't owe employees anything other than the very least you expect is for them not to sell you down the river in such a callous and ill planned manner. That's the bottom line, they have not thought this through by just throwing it onto the table and expecting it to fit into place. It's not worked for other publishers where work has returned so why would it work for Wiley?

"Publisher"

As another ex-Wiley employee I agree Wiley has been very poorly managed since the merger. A lot of shuffling around between the BW and Wiley Directors trying to keep their positions and nothing for the people on the ground actually doing the work. Expect more redundancies as Wiley flounders around some more, and expect a lot of authors and editors to go elsewhere, where their books and journals get the professional attention they really deserve.
Until I see some Directors go at Wiley, I do not believe they will recover from this merger.
And don