For those who have been waiting on tenterhooks (all three of you), the publisher is unwilling to allow me to self-archive the book chapter I had submitted last December. So the chapter will be dropped from the publication.

I’m disappointed. I’d done what I thought was my due diligence last December in alerting the editor about the need to self-archive.  However, it is that publisher’s chosen business model and they prefer to rely on librarian authors to write for them who will hand over all rights for a single copy of the finished product.

So now I’m back to the manuscript, which frankly I haven’t looked at in nearly five months.  It’s still my intent to get what I had written published, though I’m envisioning a pretty heavy overhaul due to changes that have come up and where I’m considering submitting it to in the future.

I wouldn’t consider this any kind of open access tenure victory or failure. No one really lost anything: the publisher still has a product they’ll publish, I still have a manuscript, and I had a good experience working with the editor who was most involved. Yes, I could have gotten a publication credit out of it but as in current format it is not Capital-R Research, it’s not hugely influential insofar as what I need to have in my tenure dossier. But it’s something I’ve gone through now. I have a better idea on process and I’m more comfortable asking in the initial inquiries, making it clear that this is a requirement for me before I submit even a proposal.

For today, it just means it goes back on the white board.