I want to draw the attention of the scholarly community to an unfortunate recent episode concerning monograph publication of my research on Adam Smith, in particular relation to the quotation of text under copyright.

 

Many will be aware of the "fair dealing" provisions in relation to quotation of text under copyright: when quotation of such texts exceeds, either 400 words in a single quotation, or a total of 800 words in a series of distinct quotations from one source (any one of which exceeds 300 words), then the permission of the copyright holder is required in order for publication to proceed.

 

My forthcoming book on Adam Smith's political economy and the prehistory of its fundamental concepts (The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy, Routledge, 2008) exceeded the fair dealing provisions in respect of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (the "Glasgow Edition", 6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon, 1976--1983).

 

I should add immediately that my book in large part involves exhaustive scrutiny of the use of key terms in Smith's texts -- for example, "nature", "scarcity", "capital". Such an exercise is enabled by recourse to the CD-ROM of the Glasgow Edition (The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, with Supplementary Texts, Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corporation, 2002; Past Masters: Humanities Databases, Full Text Scholarly Editions). Such tracing of word uses is itself a "wordy" business, so that in total, 24,000 words of Smith are quoted from the Glasgow Edition in my book. My book is itself just over 200,000 words.

 

This is of course a large quantity of words quoted. But I must also emphasize, as I did in my letter of request to the copyright holder (Oxford University Press), that the quotations are entirely in the manner of normal scholarly quotation in an academic book -- albeit on a large scale, due to the intensive textual analysis involved. The single largest quote is 381 words; only four quotations exceed 300 words; a further sixteen quotations are between 200 and 300 words.

 

I was therefore astounded when OUP replied to my request, indicating they would grant me permission to so quote the Glasgow Edition, but charge a "permission fee" of UK950.00 (pounds sterling). [I add a parenthetical point of information here: strangely, this fee was decomposed into UK650.00 for the Wealth of Nations, UK200.00 for the Lectures on Jurisprudence and UK100.00 for the Correspondence; for the other three volumes (hence, including The Theory of Moral Sentiments), "free permission" was granted. Why this distinction, I have no idea.]

 

I had no choice but to pay it. It is true that I could have abandoned use of the Glasgow Edition and transformed all my Smith quotations into quotations from earlier out-of-copyright editions of Smith. Almost needless to say, this would have been an extraordinarily large labour -- much "costlier" than UK950.00. Furthermore, it would have been very user-unfriendly for readers, that I was then not using the definitive edition of Smith's works. For these kinds of scholarly purposes, OUP in effect "owns" Adam Smith these days.

 

As a further sad side issue to this episode, the five years of research I undertook for this book were part funded by a grant of over AU$250,000 from the Australian Research Council (the government grant-funding authority for support of academic research in Australia). The OUP fee was just over AU$2,000 in Australian dollars. The ARC prohibits its grants from being used to fund the "production costs" of books, which is fair enough. I argued to them that the OUP permission fee was a cost of acquiring research materials essential to the communication of the research to scholarly communities. The ARC ruled that it was a book production cost and would not allow me to pay it from their funds. (Happily, my own university came to the rescue on that.)

 

To say that I was disgusted by all this would be an understatement. I have never heard of such a thing happening before, and that was also the kind of reaction I had from colleagues with whom I discussed the matter.

 

What is going on? It is possible that the OUP demand was unusual, reflecting the unusually large quantity of words I was seeking to quote. (They offered no explanation of their policy whatsoever.) Alternatively, it is possible that it reflects a more general policy development, in which university and other Presses are taking a rather more commercial -- one might even be tempted to say, "mercenary" -- approach to their management of their intellectual property assets. If the latter is the case, it hardly needs to be said that it would be a disturbing development from the point of view of scholarly communities, particularly those that are at all significantly engaged in textual analysis.

 

I would be interested to know if my experience with OUP is indeed unusual, or whether others are being asked to make such permissions payments - whether by OUP or other Presses.

 

Tony Aspromourgos