The one major change that was not included in our January 2024, 3-year plan for the journal1 was to change publishers to Wiley.2 The three main advantages we foresaw were a significant reduction in publication times, improved readability of papers, and a route for authors to obtain open access publication of their papers via Wiley agreements with institutions worldwide.2 This means that authors from many universities will get payment for open access publication via their institution and do not need to have grants for this purpose. Having worked with Wiley as editor-in-chief of Ophthalmic this delayed the process for several months. When we did start converting the backfiles, there were a lot of problems and for many weeks the only issue that was on the new website was from 1941. Several weeks later, we added an issue from 2016. Most of the problems have now been solved and we just have a few remaining issues to fix. Our Wiley online library journal site has been designed (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15389235) and we have reworked our ‘author guidelines’ to fit in with the Wiley process. Wiley allows papers to be submitted in ‘free format’ style, which means that you can format your manuscript and references in the style or format you prefer if it includes all the information necessary for conducting peer review. Wiley then updates the formatting into the OVS style if the manuscript is accepted for publication. At the same time, OVS has some formatting information mentioned in the guidelines, which we provide to potential authors. For example, we ask for data to be presented as recommended by Altman et al.,3 to ensure that the data are readable and credible. The process of producing the papers we had accepted in late 2025 did not start until we had a new working website; and in hindsight, that was probably not the best approach. We then had to go through the process of agreeing to the publication process and style/formatting of OVS papers. Wolters–Kluwer had a nonnegotiable “template” production process that produced very cramped text with some descending letters (g, j, p, q, y) even hitting the superscript reference numbers of the sentence below. It was one of the reasons we switched publishers as we wanted more readable papers. Some things are ‘Wiley-style’ and nonnegotiable (e.g., the fixed front page look ; providing doi numbers with all references if available; minor things such as italicizing the p in p-value ) while others are not, which we have been able to change to an OVS style. This process took longer than it should have done as it wasn't clear what was negotiable and what was not. There were also certain minor issues that cropped up because we did not fully understand the new system. For example, at Wolters–Kluwer we changed tables that were just too big to publish in a PDF in a readable way and made them appendices, which were provided exclusively online, with links to them given in both the HTML and PDF versions. At Wiley, “appendices” are published at the end of a paper in both HTML and PDF versions. Many of these tables were rotated so that the data or text had to be read vertically, which the OVS editorial team and I really disliked. We now understand (after some time) that only tables and figures are submitted as ‘Supplementary Information’ to Wiley that get published online only with links. All these issues have meant that the publication of papers for the January, February and March 2026 issues has been greatly delayed. Indeed, our aim of providing quicker publication by switching to Wiley has, in the short term, led to much longer waits for publication. I apologize for those delays. Now we have a functioning website and a publication system that we have agreed to and understand; we hope that publication times from acceptance to publication will greatly reduce. They should be down to 30 days in the next few months and quicker still moving forward. Currently, submissions are being processed through our old Editorial Manager system, whereas the Editorial Office and I are currently learning how the Wiley submission process of Research Exchange works. We are working with a mock system so that we should know it well enough prior to dealing with real submissions. In terms of marketing, we have done relatively little other than initial conversations and the design of a new OVS cover, which I think is excellent. It is used for the January 2026 issue on the journal site and reminds me a little of Sauron's eye from the Lord of the Rings film series. The process of configuring access for the site for AAO members is ongoing as AAO staff are attempting to make access as simple and easy as possible. It is nearly there. Finally, I want to thank all the authors whose paper publications have been significantly delayed. We very much appreciate your patience and hope the papers meet your approval. Our next job is to make sure other researchers know about them and that is where Wiley's marketing team will help. We promise that going forward, the production process will rapidly improve and publication times will shrink significantly. David B. Elliott: Writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. The author declares no conflicts of interest.
David B. Elliott (Sun,) studied this question.