US publishers Wiley buys UK’s Emerald for £337m to expand global academic portfolio, increase content pool for AI licensing deals

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US academic journals publisher Wiley is paying £337m ($452m) in cash for Cambridge Information Group’s Emerald Publishing.

In a statement, Wiley says that “the acquisition expands Wiley’s journal portfolio to approximately 2,500 titles and establishes it as a leader in the social sciences - particularly economics, business, and finance.”

Additionally, the acquisition “deepens Wiley’s proprietary content position for use in AI and data analytics, at a moment when demand for trusted peer-reviewed research content is accelerating rapidly as corporations build out AI models and applications.”

Emerald was founded in 1967 and now publishes nearly 500 journal brands around the world, 8,000 book titles, and owns an archive of case studies and other ‘backfile’ content (a research industry term typically indicating non-digital content which can be digitised).

Wiley says that Emerald is expected to generate over $85m in revenue for the financial year to the end of December 2026. This includes 92% recurring subscription revenue, with 85% of revenue generated outside North America. Wiley projects around $30m in cost saving within three years.

In October 2025, Wiley announced the launch of Wiley AI Gateway, which it claimed was “the [research] industry's first AI-native research intelligence platform that provides researchers access to trusted content from world-leading scholarly publishers through a single endpoint.”

The AI Gateway, Wiley said, “employs advanced content transformation technology to convert scholarly and expert content into AI-optimized formats while preserving citation integrity, methodological context, and peer-review validation… This sophisticated enrichment process, combined with an endpoint built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), ensures that AI tools can effectively understand, synthesize, and cite research content with the accuracy and reliability that scientific discovery requires.”

According to the Wiley website, the publisher’s AI partners include Anthropic, AWS, the European Space Agency’s EVE, and Perplexity.