Getting permission to reuse material?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I've published a few related papers and some are still under review. I want to write a book where I want to reuse some textual material from these papers. I presume I have to ask for permission to do it. Whom to ask? The journal editor, the publisher? What is the extent of the material that can be reused? One sentence, one paragraph, several pages...? How to deal with papers that are under review? I know that authors address this in the acknowledgement section of their books. But exact rules are not clear to me. Can anyone help?

These are excellent questions, especially given that one could get oneself into a difficult position by going about things the wrong way. One reader submitted the following response to the OP:

Read the publication agreements you signed. For many of the big publishers (Springer, for example), you have the right to include the material in a monograph (a single author book). All you have to do is acknowledge where it was published, says, Phil Studies, and thank the publisher for the right to include material (in whole or in part) in your acknowledgement in the book. Done!

However, in my experience things aren't quite as simple as this. Let me explain.

In addition to the publication agreements you've signed with journals, there is also the question of what book publishers will let you reuse. My experience is that some publishers will allow you to include some already-published material in the book, but that their contractual requirements can be rather strict, particularly if you are an early-career author. For example, whereas I've seen books by well-known, senior authors that include material from anywhere from 3-5 papers they have already published, in my own experience as a junior author I've found that presses may only allow 10% of your book or one chapter to be already-published material. Moreover, I also know of cases of book publishers insisting that a book by an early-career scholar contain no reused material.

In other things, although you may be able to negotiate, the amount of material that different book publishers will contractually allow you to reuse can really be all over the map. The question then is how to handle this situation. Here, things can be rather difficult. One can of course try to send book proposals to presses before even writing a book--but, in my experience, publishers usually want to review at least several chapters or even the whole book before offering a contract. So, I'm guessing the safe thing to do here is probably to write up a proposal and several chapters that you can place under review, and then if a press is interested in the proposal, places your chapters under review, and offers a contract, the thing to do is to see how much material you can reuse in negotiating your contract.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours, particularly those of you who have experience with these matters?

Comments

[Jonathan Ichikawa]

On the legal question: it is important to remember that depending on the details of your contract, the journal may own a copyright on the words you used in the article — if so you need their permission to publish them again. But the ideas behind them are still your own. Philosophical ideas cannot be copyrighted.

So you always have the legal right, even if you don't seek permission from the journal, to rewrite the ideas of your published paper in another context, say, in a book.

[Tim]

I have a potentially naïve question on these issues. What does it mean to "reuse material"? Does it mean: copy/paste from a previously published article, perhaps with a little editing?

I ask because I would have thought journals could copyright prose, but not ideas. So one could, in principle, re-write the material from a previous publication, presenting it in a different way. I would have thought that would side-step the issue of "reusing material." But I'm not sure.

[Chris]

For what it's worth, I (an ECR) recently published my first book and did exactly what Jonathan and Tim describe: I included ideas and arguments from several papers I had previously published, but in every case, I wrote their exposition anew and simply cited the relevant papers. Sometimes I said things like "I have argued elsewhere...", and often I put a slightly different spin on the material - expanding it, updating it in light of new developments, etc. As far as I could tell I was completely within my rights to do this, and it hasn't caused any problems.