Wiley has announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic for a pilot project to integrate academic and scholarly research into the AI for use as source material. The partnership hinges on the adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that will enable integration between peer-reviewed content and AI platforms. This initial integration covers multiple academic disciplines, including life sciences, education, and earth sciences and will work to provide participating university partners with enhanced access to Wiley research content.
The partnership focuses on establishing standards for how AI tools can integrate scientific journal content, while maintaining author attribution and citations. As such, information accessed through MCP carries its provenance and maintains full context, ensuring author attribution so researchers and AI applications can trace insights back to their original sources.
"The future of research lies in ensuring that high-quality, peer-reviewed content remains central to AI-powered discovery," Josh Jarrett, SVP of AI Growth at Wiley, said. "Through this partnership, Wiley is not only setting the standard for how academic publishers integrate trusted scientific content with AI platforms, but is also creating a scalable solution that other institutions and publishers can adopt."
The collaboration will see immediate application through its integration with Anthropic's Claude for Education program. Launched on April 3, Claude for Education provides universities with universal access to Claude’s AI tools and further integrate them into the educational experience. The first schools participating are Northeastern University, the London School of Economics, and Champlain College.
"We're excited to partner with Wiley to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance access to scientific research," Lauren Collett, who leads higher education partnerships at Anthropic, said about the agreement with Wiley. "This collaboration demonstrates our commitment to building AI that amplifies human thinking—enabling students to access peer-reviewed content with Claude, enhancing learning and discovery while maintaining proper citation standards and academic integrity."
The initial collaboration represents what Wiley says is a test case for broader AI integration in academic publishing, and Wiley describes it as a pilot program. Wiley plans to make a beta version of the integration more widely available in fall 2025. The goal of this pilot project is to assist Wiley in developing "a blueprint for how AI should integrate with scholarly content.” The intent is to establish best practices that emphasizes respect for copyright and intellectual property, as well as standards for consistent and accurate attribution and citation.
Anthropic is currently being sued by three authors who allege that the AI firm used their copyrighted works without permission to train its AI systems. In June, a court ruled that while using legally acquired copyrighted books to train AI large language models constitutes fair use, downloading pirated copies of those books for permanent storage violates copyright law. Jarrett stressed that it is Wiley's belief that "AI is here to stay, and should be built on verified, high-quality information. This is where we can add value as a publisher, to ensure that AI models are using trusted sources."
The new agreement is the latest in a series of partnerships Wiley has made with AI companies. At last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair Wiley announced Wiley AI Partnerships, described as "a co-innovation program” that “aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency and accuracy of scientific discovery.” It’s first partnership was with Potato, an AI research assistant powered by peer-reviewed literature.
In May, Wiley partnered with Perplexity to integrate Wiley’s educational content into Perplexity’s generative AI search platform for students and educators. Early users of that platform include Texas A&M University and Texas State, as well several universities in the U.K.
Wiley has also moved aggressively in signing licensing agreements with AI companies. It generated AI revenue of $40 million in the fiscal year ended this May, which included $9 million from an agreement with a third firm in a deal worth a total of $18 million.
