Category: Universities

Negotiating Academic Publishing Contracts

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My post on academic publishing has been getting lots of reads recently. Serendipitously, I find I have more to add on this subject — since I wrote it, I’ve been putting my own advice into practice. Given that it is still quite rare for academics to share contract negotiating experiences, that (English) people hate talking about money, and that I now have some examples of how it can go, I thought it might be useful to share my experiences here, and then summarise what I think I’ve learnt that might be helpful to other people.

Please know, I am winging this in my own way, and have no legal expertise or mentor to guide me on this at all. I’ve just tried to read around the subject and start pushing for changes when things seem unfair.

Here are five times I negotiated over the past couple of years, what happened, and the lessons I think I learnt. Details are vague, and in some cases slightly disguised, because I don’t want to break contractual confidentialities or piss off the nice people who publish my work.

I realise that in trade press terms, the contracts I’ve managed to secure for my academic work are still pretty appalling, but I’m trying to find ways to make the experience of academic publishing better for myself in the ways I can. If anyone has advice on how I can do this more effectively, please post in the comments section.

  1. Invited chapter in an edited book for a university press

I was contacted by the editors of a collection of essays, and agreed to write a submission for their book, which was already under contract with an academic publisher based in the US. Some months later the publisher contacted me with a contract for my contribution. Unluckily for them, I hadn’t started the work yet, was dreading it, and had that very day had a terrible research experience that left me wondering if I should publish any academic work ever again given that writing about other people’s practice is an ethical minefield.

In other words, when I opened the contract I was already pissed off. When I saw the contract, rage grew. It was the most exploitative kind of contract you can be offered: assignment of copyright in perpetuity, no ability to reuse my own work without permission, no payment, no percentage of royalties and on and on.

I decided I didn’t want to publish the chapter that badly, and actually not writing it would be a relief. I sent a quite blunt email to the publisher directly, saying I was appalled at the terms, the lack of payment, the basic and gross exploitation of my labour and they could either present me with something better, or I would not submit the work. I totally meant this. I was not in ‘threat’ mode.

The publisher wrote back apologising, offered me an ‘exclusive licence to publish’ contract that allowed me to retain my copyright, use my work with attribution and collect secondary use royalties. They also offered me a (albeit paltry) fee of £150 for the chapter.

I accepted the terms, wrote and submitted the chapter, and was paid.

Lessons: In academic publishing, as in dating, you are more likely to be successful in negotiations when you hold all the power – that is, when you don’t care. If I had written a less confrontational email, or had I cared about my relationship with the publisher/been in a better mood I may have lost the opportunity or ended up signing an exploitative contract.

2. Invited contribution to a publication for an education press

I was invited by a commissioning editor at an education imprint of a popular press to contribute a longish (9,000 word) chapter to a forthcoming publication. The contract I was presented was a licence to publish — that means I retain copyright — and offered a small flat fee (£300) for completing the work, no royalties.

This was a project I was really excited to be asked to do, and that presented a great career opportunity, given it was likely to be much more widely read than anything else I’d ever published.

I asked whether there was the possibility of negotiating for some percentage of royalties should the book sell a certain number of copies (that is for the contract to allow me to share in any future success of the work). I was told no, as this was a standard contract that the publisher does not negotiate on.

I decided to accept the contract as initially presented, submitted and was paid for the work.

Lessons: You don’t always get what you ask for. If you want to do something, you have to decide whether accepting less than ideal terms is worth it in relation to the other benefits of an opportunity to your career and reputation.

3. Monograph with an academic publisher

I submitted a proposal for a monograph to a UK-based academic publisher, having had some positive conversations around my initial idea with a commissioning editor there. It was accepted and I was offered a standard contract for that publishing house, which is a small percentage of royalties (2.5%), no advance, I keep copyright but give them exclusive right to publish in all territories, they have first right to refusal on my next book.

I wrote to the commissioning editor I had the initial contact with and asked for a small (hundreds of pounds) advance, 5% of royalties with the percentage growing to 10% once 500 copies were sold, and the ability to offer specific future books I have planned to other publishers. Those terms were agreed, and I signed the contract and am working on the book.

Lessons: I think I had more leverage than I otherwise might as I already had a monograph out, and at the time it was shortlisted for a prize. Also, I was really asking for the bare minimum in terms of what unions like The Society of Authors suggest is fair in contractual terms. I’d say it’s always worth at least doing that.

4. Book with a commercial-academic publisher

I had an idea for a book, and discussed it with a commissioning editor at a commercial publishing house that also publishes academic and education texts, based in the UK. I had already worked with this editor on another project. I was clear from the first conversation that I wanted a decent contract if this book were to go ahead — specifically, because the book involves contributions from others, I wanted a budget to pay contributors and to do some of the other creative work the book will need.

I worked with the commissioning editor and some collaborators on the proposal. The eventual contract had everything I asked for, including a fairly generous advance (four figures, but in academic terms that’s acceptable), budget for the contributors and creative work and a decent percentage of royalties (10%), increasing on successful sales of the publication.

Lessons: If you can find a good commissioning editor, build a relationship and really work with them to explain your ideas, get them onside and articulate why certain budgets might be necessary to the success of the publication, you are more likely to get a decent contract. I think it helped that I had a really clear vision for the project and could make a good case for a large market for the book.

5. Short journal article

I submitted a short article to an academic journal based in the US, which was accepted. The contract asked me to forfeit all rights to the work, including copyright. I wrote a polite email to the journal editor explaining that I do not relinquish copyright and could anything be done, and I was immediately sent a different contract which merely asked for licence to publish (not even exclusive licence), and enabled me to keep all my rights to my work.

Lesson: I would suggest all writers refuse to relinquish copyright to their work as the absolute minimum condition of publication. If you feel you are offered an exceptional reason or circumstance around the necessity of copyright assignment, check with a union such as the Society of Authors before you agree to sign copyright over to someone else.

I hope if you’ve read this far some of my experience is useful. If you have specific questions, advice for me, or would like to chat over your experiences with publishing contracts do send me an email or comment below. Again, I am not a lawyer and cannot offer legal advice on contracts, but I am always interested to hear about others’ experiences and share knowledge where possible.

PS: I have left Twitter due to it being ruinous to my psychological wellbeing, but if any of my friends or readers wants to publish it there, I’d really be grateful. Academic Twitter is probably the audience for this.

REF: We need to push back against a system that has lost its way

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I am not against the assessment of academic research, in principle. Universities are institutions that receive public funding and there are good arguments for robust quality-checks of the business that goes on in them. However, the Research Excellence Framework — the current system by which university research is assessed, known by most of us ‘REF’ — has lost its mind.

As anyone who works in a university will know, rather than the twice-decade external audit of HE business that I imagine (hope) the framework was conceived as, REF has now become HE business. At most universities, whole layers of bureaucracy have been created — at a financial and human cost vastly outstripping the return of even the most stellar REF results — to game the system: annual, internal practice REFs where we are required to assess one another’s work in a project designed, surely, to create internal tensions; case-studies written to articulate the impact of projects that haven’t happened yet; research-plan monitoring to ensure we are all ‘REF compliant’; the implementation of complex IT systems where research can be stored, graded and recorded for easy REF access.

Meanwhile, academics are encouraged (read forced by the threat of career suicide if they resist) to produce outputs — not on the basis of the value of their research to the public, or their desire and readiness to express ideas to the world, but on the government-mandated requirement that every five or so years, academics have two, or four, or six (or whatever the Higher Education Funding Council for England, HEFCE — the quango currently in charge of this mess until UK Research and Innovation takes over in a few days time — decides they want us to produce) ‘world leading’ publications ready for scrutiny. Yes, you are expected to produce ‘world leading’ publications, regardless of whether you are a scholar no one has head of a few years out of your PhD, or a professor with 40 years experience and an international reputation.

The result is that research is no longer assessed by the REF, but rather produced for the REF in a worrying Orwellian model that utterly compromises academic integrity and against which we should fight back. The recent news that, as of REF2027 (or 26, who knows when it will happen considering we haven’t even had REF2021 yet) all books and book-length works are required to be available Open Access (i.e. free of charge to the public, as academic articles published in journals already have to be) is yet another nail in the coffin for UK research quality, announced by a body that is ostensibly in place to maintain the country’s research rigour.

The Royal History Society have written a comprehensive list of the ways that this requirement poses a threat to research in that discipline (it is worth reading in full as it is applicable across all humanities and possibly beyond). Quite why HEFCE would want to cause widespread anxiety by announcing this now, almost a decade before the audit happens — but, ironically, too late for those of us with book contracts with international presses due for delivery after 2020 — is beyond me. It feels like yet another attack on Higher Education by those gunning for its demise.

Whatever form the Open Access requirement takes, and however much HEFCE protests requirements will be made in ‘consultation’ with universities (I am preparing another post on the tyranny of ‘consultation’), this is a change that will — as HEFCE admit — require ‘a lot of work’ to implement. No. An audit process should not take resources away from the thing being audited. Our ‘hard work’ should be in writing the books, reading the books, and teaching our students — not in ensuring that we ‘comply’ with a complex top-down mandate or else risk our careers.

It is outrageous bordering on a national disgrace that we are now in a situation where the government is effectively interfering with the material substance of the research that goes on in our institutions. That we are increasingly unable to publish with the presses most suitable for our work, and must, instead, find ‘REF compliant’ publishers compromises academic objectivity — not to mention its rigour, reach and international credibility. I also wonder how it is even legal for the government to interfere in the market this way, forcing publishers who work with academics to either give their product away for free or else lose all business (I realise there are also questions to be asked about the ethics of some of the commercial academic publishers in relation to academic writing, but that’s a conversation for another time).

What can we do? I am asking seriously. How do we push back against this creeping threat to our work, its substance and our lives? The process of a peer-review quality check on research should not dictate the sector to this degree. REF in its current form is simply not sustainable, nor conducive to the health of research institutions or the people in them. This is violence by bureaucracy and it cannot be allowed to continue.