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Production problems at Oxford University Press

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–COMMENTS ARE WORTH READING; FORTUNATELY, SOME AUTHORS HAVE HAD GOOD EXPERIENCES; AN OUP EDITOR ALSO WEIGHS IN; DO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN OUP (UK) AND OUP (NY) WHEN RECOUNTING YOUR EXPERIENCES

I've been hearing from philosophy colleagues at various places over the last couple of months about serious problems with the production process at OUP:   endless delays; sloppy copy-editing; in one case, failure to send marketing copies to journals for review, and so on.    Lots of enterprises were under financial pressure during the pandemic, and I've heard, but don't know details, that there was a lot of "restructuring" at OUP.   I'm opening comments for reports from readers about problems (including readers in disciplines outside philosophy), or insights any folks may have into what's going on.  (For what it's worth, the copy-editing on my Moral Psychology with Nietzsche [OUP-UK, 2019] was excellent, but that of course was before the pandemic.)

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42 responses to “Production problems at Oxford University Press”

  1. David Velleman

    Production problems at OUP go back a long way. The second printing of my book The Possibility of Practical Reason appeared the title "The Possibility of Probable Reason" and had to be shredded. The price of the replacement then rose to over $50. I insisted on taking the copyright back from them and placed the book with an open-access publisher.

    Reply
  2. Elizabeth

    We had a very difficult time with the company in India that OUP outsourced production to. The problems were mainly with copyediting–sloppy, missed things, sent wrong versions back, failed to make author's requested changes, etc.

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  3. An author

    I was thinking of sending them my book. Should I reconsider?

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  4. a reviewer

    I agreed to review three OUP books for a leading history journal that have already come out, but after months and many entreaties from the journal only one has actually arrived. I was given six months to review the three books, but this will have to be pushed back for whenever the final book eventually arrives (if ever).

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  5. OUP author

    I had similar problems to those Elizabeth mentions above. Errors seemed to be introduced at each iteration, requiring endless rounds of back-and-forth and way more re-reading than should have been necessary. Even then, errors were introduced between the final proofs and the printed product, including errors I had noted and was explicitly told would be fixed. Worse yet, the book's blurb was written by someone other than myself and published online without my approval. It was misleading about the contents of the book, and written in an extremely unprofessional way. And it would have made it onto the physical jacket had I not immediately intervened (the publication of the book details online was also never announced to me… so it was pure luck that I checked in time).

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  6. Bill

    I had problems with a journal published by OUP recently. The main issue was truly terrible copy-editing.

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  7. another reviewer

    I've reviewed three OUP books (two monographs, one edited volume, all in history of philosophy) in the past few years, and I have also noticed an unusual number of copyediting problems. Some of these were run-of-the-mill oversights of the sort one might expect from any press, but others were egregious–in some cases they hindered comprehension, in others they led to ambiguous citations and misattributions. In this same period I have reviewed books from other presses, and the sloppiness of OUP's copyediting has consistently stood out. Something's off.

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  8. Vicky L Brandt

    Last year OUP shuttered its own printing operations and fired 20 skilled staff (even though outsourcing had led to so many problems): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/oxford-university-press-to-end-centuries-of-tradition-by-closing-its-printing-arm It seems to be the consequence of the same austerity policies that are driving academic and healthcare institutions and everything else into the ground, for the profit of a few stakeholders (relatedly, see https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n24/laleh-khalili/in-clover).

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  9. John Schwenkler

    Can those who've had problems with OUP please specify roughly when these took place? For my part, when I published a monograph with OUP (US) in 2019 I found the copyediting to be unbelievably careful and thorough, and I also had a good experience in publishing an edited collection with OUP (UK) a year later. If the problems being described here are mainly post-pandemic, then that is a shame, as my own good experiences (like Brian's) might be a thing of the past.

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  10. OUP author

    The problems I described occurred between the end of 2020 and early 2021.

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  11. GB

    In October of this year I had my second-worst ever experience with copy-editing. This was with an OUP journal. There were a number of problems in the proofs I received, but the worst one was that every instance of italics had been replaced with quote-marks. So, for example, if I had italicized a word for emphasis, the copy-editor removed the italics and put the word in quotes. In at least one instance this was even done with an italicized word inside a quotation. (Thankfully, these problems were addressed when I pointed them out. I was allowed to review a second set of proofs, in which everything was fine,)

    Until seeing this thread, though, I would have said that these problems weren't new. That's because my worst ever experience with copy-editing was also with an OUP journal, back in 2017. (A different journal.) In that case, astoundingly, my NAME was messed up in the article's title; and various other changes were made (for example, all spellings were switched to American English, such as 'realise' -> 'realize', against the journal's own editorial policy).

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  12. Elizabeth

    Mine was late 2021 into early-mid 2022.

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  13. Adrian Bardon

    The text of mine that was in production in 2019 was handled well. I can say that–without naming any names–regardless of what is happening at OUP your experience at the major for-profit publishers is not likely to be any better.

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  14. Nicholas Denyer

    The text of Plato in Oxford Scholarly Editions Online is very sloppily presented.

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  15. OUP editor

    I edited a volume for OUP (US) that appeared in 2020, but all the production was in 2019 and it was already very sloppy. One chapter required us to go back and forth three or four times to get a very simple figure right. But when we got the book, the figure STILL had an error.

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  16. Ned Block

    I've had a pretty good experience with OUP for a book that is about to come out, with good copy-editing and good handling of the first proof, but I should add that I haven't seen the final proof corrections yet.

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  17. Christopher Morris

    I have just co-edited two volumes of David Gauthier’s essays for OUP (UK), and the production — the process and the outcome — was excellent. A company in the Philippines did the printing, and it was excellent. The indexer the Press provided was also very good.

    It would be important to say whether the difficulties you had were with OUP UK or OUP nyc, as the two are separate companies.

    Also, authors or editors are normally send proofs and have the opportunity to catch errors. If new errors are introduced that would of course be scandalous.

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  18. David Velleman

    Some years ago, an OUP editor explained to me (over coffee at an APA meeting) that, with the computerization of the production process, it became economic to print small batches of a title and to outsource editorial processes to less expensive markets. The result, he explained, was a business model of maximizing the volume of *titles* sold, each of which might sell less than what was required when the aim was to maximize the volume of *copies* of a given title. Since then I have watched Oxford pursue this strategy with a vengeance, to the detriment of quality in their output.

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  19. David Velleman

    I interpreted him as saying that OUP was going to emulate MacDonald's.

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  20. Mike

    I've had two experiences publishing books with OUP UK, one in 2015, and most recently with a book that came out just recently. My experiences with the press have been very good. In particular, my copy editor was competent and efficient (this was someone based in the UK, with a decades-long relationship with OUP). I submitted my manuscript in LaTeX and made my own figures, which might have helped smooth out the production process. Also, I made an effort to submit very clean manuscripts, to minimize the need for guesswork or intervention on the part of editors and production managers.

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  21. Publishing Veteran

    There is a very vicious circle at the heart of scholarly publishing, one symptom of which is the fact that many participants these days think that the term “scholarly communications” is in some way more meaningful. Universities primarily don’t think of their mission as involving publishing, but use the vaguer term “dissemination,” which seems to refer to teaching or perhaps the act of writing, but definitely none of the subsequent activities that get the writing before the eyes of an audience. This is not new incidentally. When the University of Chicago was launched with the intention of also creating a press that would disseminate the university’s scholarship, most of the faculty were resistant. Most university presses these days focus exclusively on books, and the margins are terrible. The audience for scholarly books is limited, which means that many presses have to price their titles quite high — beyond the reach of individuals, but theoretically within the budgets of university libraries. At the same time, the marketization of universities, has led administrators to behave just like corporations, where cutting expenses associated with internal cost centers, is a great way of managing the bottom line. The library is the cost center par excellence. As library budgets have been cut over the past 20+ years, there are fewer books and journals that they can purchase, which leads to a number of knock-in effects. Presses cut down on the number of titles they publish, they cut down on the number of purely specialist titles and go after larger audiences, they keep raising prices for titles with a limited audience, they cut back on their expenses as well (including copyediting, which either becomes the author’s responsibility or is off-shored where the quality-to-cost is acceptable to the publisher.) The presses that publish both journals and books are much more financially successful, because the institutional subscription model for journals is more favorable for publishers than the transactional, point-of-sale model for books. Publishers tend to spend less on book operations than journals, as a result. The fact that the instrumental disciplines that are seen as the ones that bring in the big dollars assess themselves almost completely in terms of journal citations, and no not publish books, further adds to the lack of willingness to invest in book publishing. These dynamics are what has led to the Open Access movements, which has recently rebaptized itself as Open Science. Most of the arguments in favor of it are nonsense to anyone who has been involved in publishing books and journals, as opposed to writing, editing or purchasing them. The genesis of OA was the irritation faced by librarians who had to pay for numerous materials while their budgets were being cut. Instead of the difficult course of making persuasive arguments to administrators, they vented their outrage (fueled by vast and chthonic resources of Nietzschean ressentiment) to the publishers and made the case that everything should be made available for free. The disappearance of the profession of librarian as one likely outcome seems not to have occurred to anyone. If altruism can be said to have been a motive, it was of the ineffective kind. Instead of subscriptions, we know have a high-minded form of vanity publishing whereby individual authors have the luxury of paying an “author processing charge” in order for their work to appear on an open access basis in many journals, including fully open access titles. Instead of medical researchers having an article appear in Nature where access will be covered through a library subscription, they now have the privilege of paying over $11,000 to make it open access. Does that come extra special editing or peer review? They made a wasteland and called it open.

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  22. Becko Copenhaver

    My experiences with OUP before, during, and after the pandemic have been excellent. We've had a terrific time with our series (Oxford Guides — see John Schwenkler's comment above, which was our first title — his book on Anscombe's intention) — that I co-edit with Mark Timmons and Chris Shields.

    What's being reported is certainly concerning and people should reach out to their OUP contacts personally to let them know. For my part, I focus on the fact that behind the acronym are people, probably a very small number of people, who have the same sorts of stresses and exhaustions we all have, especially after the pandemic, when so many of us are overwhelmed doing the best we can.

    Reply
  23. Christopher Morris

    I think that the presses of the prestigious private American universities are subsidized by their universities — i know some are, not sure how much to generalize. By contrast, Oxford and, I believe, Cambridge are charged with contributing to their university’s budget.

    This said, all academic presses are suffering. Academic books don’t sell enough copies. Indeed, non-academic presses are not that profitable and, like the film industry, depend on blockbusters to make money (and cover the costs of the other books they publish).

    And the news industry is in trouble too, as most everyone has noticed.

    OUP and CUP and the other great presses should maintain high standards of production, but this is not an industry — domain, or whatever word you prefer — that is having an easy go these days.

    Reply
  24. David Ross

    While I agree with Publishing Veteran that profit motive can and has led to quality control issues in the finished product, I disagree with most of his or her screed. A few points: (i) "Open Access" is not the same thing as "Open Science", and certainly hasn't rebranded itself in that way. (ii) Paying to publish is not at all new, and is not tantamount to vanity publishing; page charges have been a fact of life at least in scientific publishing as long as I've been in the business (almost 45 years since my first academic publication). (iii) The presses I'm most familiar with have been expanding, not decreasing, the number of specialist journals they publish, often to an annoying extent.

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  25. John Collins

    I have published three books with OUP and have had excellent care and great copy editing (the last published 2020). As Christopher mentions, I think, it is very important to distinguish OUP(US) from OUP(UK). I have had experience with other publishers, and would rank OUP(UK) as top by a country mile.

    If a comparative survey were made, OUP, whatever its current problems, might still be doing better than other presses.

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  26. Hilary Kornblith

    I published a book with OUP (US) in 2021 and had an excellent experience in every respect.

    Reply
  27. Publishing Veteran

    Regarding Open Science vs Open Access — how are you supporting your assertion? If you are at all familiar with the language of the proponents of openness, you should have noticed a shift to the latter term. Look at how the White House’s OSTP describes its activities its 2013 memo about making federally funded research freely available was called Open Access at the time. Now it is referred to as Open Science. It’s simply a case of revealing — much like the way the word “screed” can be used.

    There are important distinctions that need to be made about the kinds of payments that journals (the distinction between books and journals needs to be kept in mind). Page charges are about helping to cover some, but not all, of the specific production costs — the use of images is one example — that a publisher has to bear. Author processing charges are completely different. They are a means of recovering revenue that is lost in the transition to the subscription model. APCs are literally paying to publish in an environment where costs are not covered by subscription revenue.

    My comment about decreasing titles was about books, not journals. The economics are completely different. Because APC are a license to print money in the credentialing of research, it is to be expected that open journals should be sprouting up. Many of them are owned by publishers who are now monetizing the papers they used to reject, and making significant revenue as traditional subscription revenues decline or stagnate.

    Reply
  28. Anna-Lise Santella

    We at OUP are sorry to hear of the concerns raised here, and encourage you to be in touch with us directly regarding any unresolved issues. Please reach out to your editor or directly to me (at anna-lise.santella@oup.com) with the details.

    Many thanks.

    Anna-Lise Santella, Head of Acquisition, Humanities
    Oxford University Press

    Reply
  29. OUP (UK) Editor

    A volume which I co-edited entered production stage by spring 2021. We made an effort to accord with OUP's formatting guidelines for manuscripts. Indeed, the MS-Word documents had been checked by a British copy-editor working for OUP (UK) before we submitted them to the company responsible for production. From this point on, the process became painful in many respects. The first version of the proofs seemed to have been produced automatically without any human typesetter checking for correctness/consistency. The result was unacceptable. We had to close-read the entire manuscript to identify hundreds of errors. Matters got even worse when we had to communicate them to our contact-person at the production company. It seemed very difficult to bring basic points about typesetting across. To give an impression: at one point three different symbols for the conditional appeared on one page, some of them placed incorrectly. It was not possible to simply request that a uniform symbol be used. We rather had to take screenshots of the respective page, mark the symbols with an iPad-pen, and give precise instructions on what to do in each case. With every round of comments and corrections we sent, new errors were introduced and we received long lists of clarification questions in barely understandable English. As far as we could tell, the person we were communicating with had a BSc degree in engineering and was just out of college in India. They were clearly not qualified for this task. (I'd like to emphasize, though, that this person is not the culprit here!)

    The whole story is infuriating on many levels. I'd estimate that we spent about a month of full time work in 2021 with overseeing the production process. In academic publishing, publishing houses do not pay you for the content you provide them with. That's fair game: we are paid by our universities to produce said content. But by outsourcing typesetting to companies like the one we worked with, OUP effectively requires authors to spend a significant amount of time for overseeing the production process. *That* is something we do not get paid for by our universities. What makes things worse is many authors (myself included) are dependent on the "prestige points" scored through a publication with OUP. Taking our business elsewhere is thus not an option.

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  30. David Velleman

    In response to John Schwenkler: The Possibility of Probable Reason appeared (and then disappeared) in 2000.

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  31. David Velleman

    In response to Publishing Veteran: Regretfully, I must agree that the open access movement, of which I was an early proponent, has not been a success. But (with one or two exceptions) OA has never been implemented as envisioned. The idea was that individual universities would publish *some* scholarship online for free with the funds previously used to purchase scholarship that was now being published for free by other universities. A co-operative scheme! (See the section headed "Mission Statement" at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/site/about/). Unfortunately, the "marketization" of universities, as you call it, stood in the way of any significant cooperation.
    A second-best solution, represented by Philosophers' Imprint and (I believe) Ergo, has been to spread the cost of online publication more widely, with submission fees. Although this model was widely condemned when we introduced it at Philosophers' Imprint, I still believe that, for all its drawbacks, it is the least bad of the alternatives. In 9/10 of the cases, the author is the main beneficiary of the publication process — from refereeing to copyediting to proofreading to distribution — and it makes sense to give authors a mild disincentive against seeking those services for work that is half-baked. Of course, submission fees fall unequally on the shoulders of different authors, but that inequality is built in to modern academic life. A publishing model cannot compensate for every inequality.
    A deeper cause of the problem in academic publishing is the galloping inflation of the currency. The professional value of a single publication has been debased by the ever exploding CVs of one's competitors, who now include graduate students and (for all I know) undergraduates as well. Academic authors are only too willing to supply publishers with more and more content to sell, and there is a limit to the degree of care and expertise that can be devoted to the resulting flood of words.

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  32. Publishing Veteran

    The size of both the big UK university presses means that their behaviors are much more like the big commercial firms than the top university presses in the US. I’d be interested to hear if you have been given the message that publication by Yale or Princeton, say, would result in fewer “prestige points.” Or is it the case that other presses are simply not willing to undertake the kind of co-edited volume you worked on?

    The nature of the project has a big bearing on what will be considered. Chicago won’t touch a festschrift, for example, but some European firms will on a pay-to-play basis. When Cambridge undertook to publish a multi-volume critical edition of a major English poet and dramatist no too long ago, the editors had to do all the copyediting on their own. Thousands of pages, and the final product cost thousands of dollars.

    The spectrum of individual experiences authors and editors have across books and journals is vast. People do have both great experiences and terrible ones. The thing to do is to look at the general trends. I haven’t seen any positive ones for the humanities or most of the social sciences. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise given how most administrators and the public at large have been trained to view these disciplines. Remember how Obama used to follow up every mention of the word “education” with “math and science” and how he used “art history” as a byword for the ridiculous? True, he eventually was shamed into apologizing for art history. Maybe that’s the main difference between the Repugs and the Dems: they think the same thoughts much of the time, but the former would never be ashamed of them.

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  33. Roger Albin

    I had a good experience with OUP on a recently published book (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/parkinson-disease-9780190843014?cc=us&lang=en&). Copy editing and production were efficient and accurate. This was a medical text, which may be treated somewhat differently.

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  34. David Ross

    I'm EIC of a Diamond OA journal that's part of the Free Journal Network, so it is a discussion I'm involved with all the time. So, for "supporting my assertion" I will simply cite myself. However, anyone doubtful can go to the "Coalition S" website to see what they use, since Plan S is the biggest _official_ driver of OA. "Open Science" and "Open Access" overlap, but are not the same thing, and the terms are not used interchangeably.

    To be clear, I'm not defending the idea of charging authors to make the articles free for readers (so-called "green" open access), but when it does happen that doesn't make the research a vanity project.

    And I think the distinction between using author payments to cover lost subscription revenue, and using them to cover production costs, is a pretty artificial one. It reminds me of when campus administrations cut the library budget and faculty lines because of budget constraints then use "the money comes from different pots" as an excuse for how they can undertake massive new construction projects at the same time.

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  35. Paul Schofield

    I published a monograph with OUP (US) in 2021. Production took place during the pandemic. The experience was entirely positive, everything was done well and on time.

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  36. Roert Stecker

    OUP has stopped sending out copies for review in journals for some time. My last book Intersections of value: Art, Nature and the Everyday was published in 2019. They asked for a list of journals so I assumed they would send to at least some, but no. Only when an editor requested a copy, would they send it out. Even if a begged them to send to a journal, they required an editor's request. On the other hand, production in my case (prepandemic) was great. Great copy editor, smooth production. They even let me choose my cover.

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  37. One editor

    I was an editor for a collected volume with OUP and I had problems with the production process as well (sloppy editing, lack of communication with the person in charge of copyediting, mistakes appearing in the printed version). The production took place during the first wave of the pandemic (from March 2020).

    Reply
  38. One editor

    Forgot to specify that it was OUP US.

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  39. Thom Brooks

    I've had experiences good and bad, but excellent with OUP. I take the point about the market. One of the best things we can do (beyond writing excellent books) is ensure that our libraries – and our office shelves – are well stacked to support academic book publishing.

    Reply
  40. Disillusioned junior scholar

    I spent three years working like a dog on a translation that was under contract with OUP. They were sent drafts throughout the entire process and were very keen on the work. And then apropos of nothing they nullified the contract.

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  41. Disillusioned junior scholar

    (I forgot to add: I was dealing with OUP (NY). The experience was deeply depressing and humiliating.)

    Reply
  42. AnonyIntrovert

    I'd like to mention a different issue, but for me, very concerning.

    Oxford is apparently using Chegg to distribute ebooks.

    Chegg, like Course Hero, is a major disrupter-corrupter of unversity education at small to medium-sized universities in my neighborhood, particularly those who admit tons of international students unfamiliar with systems and academic expectations here. If anyone reading this blog is unfamiliar: Chegg and Course Hero apparently both have business plans that pivot around encouraging students to be dishonest.

    Their value went up exponentially during the worst period of the pandemic, when we all went online, and people started investing in Zoom and Amazon and the like. (I don't understand this stuff very well, but it looked to me like the sudden increase in value was due to investors putting in millions predicting that these companies might eventually be very profitable and go public, not that they had yet fit that description.) During the worst parts of the pandemic, there were many complaints on Better Business Bureau and Reddit. These were from students who had subscribed to the service and couldn't unsubscribe, or who had signed up as "tutors" and not got paid). ("tutor" =arbitrary non-expert or non-vetted, willing to do other students' essays/assignments without revealing their credentials or names.) I have encountered stories of international students being threatened (with being reported to a Dean unless they coughed up more money, and hence losing their ability to stay resident in the country). I don't know if these stories pertain to Chegg or Course Hero or some other company that encourages students to engage in dishonest behaviour. Though the victims have themselves been dishonest, one might call them innocently dishonest, since they are young, and tech-human systems are being set up that are corrupting and hard to distinguish from virtuous systems.

    When I noticed Oxford was using Chegg to distribute one of my favorite philosophy anthologies written by esteemed and lovable philosophers at a university of high privilege, I wrote to the salesperson to say that I was concerned. The reply made me feel I was being gaslighted at first – I was so surprised that the Oxford rep lacked knowledge about Chegg and the way it is affecting the functioning of education. So I am practicing on this blog for what I can say to the Oxford rep to explain what is problematic about using Chegg. I'm hoping some readers can help me.

    Chegg and Course Hero are both making moves apparently to try to legitimize themselves. ("Legitimize themselves" -perhaps pragmatically ambig. as between making themselves appear legitimate and becoming legitimate, sic. I don't know which it is.) I know that an arm of student support services of a certain mid-western University appears to have some arrangement with one of them, for one example. That doesn't make what Course Hero and Chegg have been doing and are continuing to do OK. They take copyrighted material and material that is not ready to be published or they cause others to do so. They waste instructor's time. They corrupt students. There's more, and it's worse.

    OK, I'll stop. Thanks.

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