My experience is based on three books published internationally, from three publishers, and they were all quite nice to talk to, and they were helpful. The first was VSP - a Dutch publisher (a book on traffic science, based on part of my Licentiate work); the second was Kluwer, now part of Springer, in which I published an extension of my PhD thesis; the third was a course book, published by the Swedish publishing house Studentlitteratur, which is now also being published by Dover internationally. My experience has been quite positive all along.

I should add that I have also published a bunch of books with smaller German publishers before, and my experiences were also quite good. This is why I was really shocked by how CRC treated us authors and editors.

Avoid publishing in books imo because they become outdated real quick. I only publish in reputable journals :)

There are good reasons for writing books, e.g. for summarizing knowledge this is the better format. But the question here is for what reasons do publishers printing books and why are scientists writing them and is there still an overlap between both groups in the age of reseach gate?

Scientists do write books for spreading their knowledge to a broader public, publishers want to earn money with that. In former times scientists got printouts and pdfs for distribution of the article in their peer groups, now some publishers simply give you a copy potected ebook that cannot be printed out, so it turns out you get a single copy of your work. INCREDIBLE!

Andrew Paul McKenzie Pegman suggested that books would be superfluous nowadays. While I myself also mainly publish in peer-reviewed international journals, I strongly disagree with this view. It might indeed be more beneficial for the own career to publish exclusively in journals, but for science as a whole it certainly is not. With the explosion of journal articles, I believe, that we need more than ever good books that summarize, synthesise and structure all the accummulated "microknowledge" to a bigger picture from time to time. Also citation rates support this view: good books receive way more citations than typical journal articles. And while journal articles nowadays play in important role in accademic teaching, I could not imagine how someone should perform his studies completely without textbooks. And finally there is the special case of biology: this discipline would be unthinkable without the many regional and national floras and faunas and the various types of monographic studies - this is all information that simply could not be published in journal articles, but many highest-impact journal articles we see in current years could only be written because in previous decades (and stil currently) numerous biologists spent a lot of time in collating the data and writing these monographs.

However, the core question that I wanted to address with this discussion was rather how we, as scientists, could deal with, and possibly find work-arounds for, the current publication system that is dominated by the greed of a few very big international science publishers. The situation with journals is rather similar as with books. The publishers reach new records in profit from year to year, while the prices for subscribers (regular journals) or authors (open access journals) increase constantly and the service and quality of the publisher continuously decreases. And this in a situation where new technologies make publishing essently more effective and less costly than previously...

I am now in a collective writing one chapter in an upcoming book in math. I find that, if very well-organized, books written by collectives can be quite effective. But you are right that it is odd that we provide an essentially free service, based on a salary from a governmental board, perhaps, but more likely we write it in our spare time, those few hours away from teaching or meetings, and administration. It ought perhaps to cost rather a lot more for the publisher to be able to produce these books, what with all the help we provide as editors and authors. Publishing houses are now more printing houses than scholarly ones anyway, as it is the scientists that run around in that wheel for squirrels, making the machinery run smoothly.

Let's not forget: authors ask publishers for services to reach their goals, whatever those might be. Publishers are in it for the money. Even if a publisher approaches you to write a book, you need to negotiate the terms, that is, if it matters to you. Some don't. Everybody's choice! A publisher once told me that it didn't matter whether he sold books or carpets (betcha, I don't publish with them anymore). As most scientists are not trained in business, they tend to learn these things "the hard way", as I did !

So here my advice: When you receive a contract from a publisher, read it first, then ask yourself whether you agree to those conditions. If not, negotiate ! If they don't budge, move on ! ... same like with carpets, right !?

Finding the publisher that suits you and your project can be a long process. And consider self-publishing! For some this can be the right way to get their ideas out there! I got a friend who is very successful with that! But if you don't want to bother with production, marketing and distribution, you will need to face our business world's mechanisms, whether you like them or not.

And by the way: all publishers charge per page for color print (that's standard now), while they usually don't charge for color in ebooks/digital formats!

Andrew: I think whether it is useful or not to publish books depends on the field. In math - my subject - old theory is still correct, and you can build on it and create both beautiful things, and immediately applicable things. Certainly many of the applied math books that are published today will be obsolete in a decade, but theoretical books can live very long and healthy lives. My colleague Terry Rockafellar has a book from 1970 (Convex Analysis) that still is very often cited, because it has the tools (definitions, theorems) that you need, and it is very elegantly written as well - something I can say with certainty - being a reviewer of a huge set of books and papers - is a practice long since forgotten.

Theo, you are right: it is a matter of negotation. But in order to be able to negotiate properly, one need to be aware of the range of conditions you could meet with different publishers. Part of my motivation to start this discussion on RG was to exchange experiences on that...

In this particular book project with CRC (which prompted my discussion) I had slipped in as author, and finally became one of the two main editors, long after the original contract had been made, so I could not negotiate much. But I could also not imagine that a publisher, if you negotiate that each author should get an electronic version of his/her own article would dare to delive solely a useless weird e-book format and deny the authors access to their own work in published format. In Germany, e.g., this would not be possible because authors are legally entitled to receive one or even several copies of their work for free.

It is evident that conditions and services of different publishers differ not a bit but by several orders of magnitude. When I published books with small German publishers, I always got a bunch of hard copies for free (and evidently also a pdf), did not pay a penny even if the whole book was in full colour, and the editing/typesetting service was reliable and competent. It is also not true that authors necessarily have to pay for colour reproductions in their printed books nowadays. A representative of Springer-Nature (where I am about signing a chapter contract after careful evaluation of the conditions) just told me that they would never charge their authors for that. And Springer-Nature is certainly anything but a charitable entity.

In short: I believe that there are still publishers out who make a living from providing good service for reasonable conditions and without exploiting authors - I hope this discussion here helps to identify such publishing houses. An alternative solution might be, as you mention, to go for self-publishing. With print-on-demand techniques it should be much easier and less costly to do it on a professional level than in the past; perhaps the most challenging is then marketing and distribution. So if anyone here has experience with this avenue, I would be glad to hear about it.

Yes, Jürgen, we should not let conditions deteriorate like that and take a firmer stand with our valuable content, and I strongly encourage that authors step out, as you do, to strengthen our cause. After all, we authors are the publishers asset.

I know of several publishers, including Springer-Nature, that charge page fees for color print for journals, series contributions, and proceedings (standard contracts) - the situation as to monographs (as in your case) depends, as I said, on negotiations (personalized contracts).

Agree with Jürgen Dengler

The " typical situation" for most scientists when writing a book is that they agreed with colleages to contribute a chapter. Then they do all the work (over weeks) and shortly before finishing the article an email arrives with the copyright statement.

In that contract author gives all her/his rights to the publisher.

And there are some rights for the author: "If the Contribution is accepted by the Publisher for publication in the Work, the Publisher agrees that the Contributor shall receive credit as the author of the Contribution in the first and subsequent editions of the Work in which the Contribution appears." Nothing else! No PDFs, no print-outs, no honorarium (of course).

And of course there is a deadline to sign it and of course you want to finish your work.

Anyway my advice: don't sign it - simply stop your work. Start negotiating with the publisher - even if all your friends, editors and coauthors become nervous and angry. Otherwise - nothing will change at all.

Well, my advice after the experience with CRC is NOT to start working on a book at all before clear and fair conditions are negotiated and agreed upon. Also ask what vague formulations mean, e.g. what format it will be if the publisher promises you an e-book...

Based on my experiences with CRC, I now know what the critical aspects can be. For most of them you can make a written agreement before you start (the only thing that is not really predictable is how good or bad the service of the publisher is, e.g. the quality of type-setting, copy-editing and printing). For me the most crucial point is that all authors need to receive a fully functional print or pdf copy of their own work. (If I am not mistaken German law even requires this...)

I can also report that not all big international science publishers behave as badly as CRC: I have just got a contract for a book chapter offered from Springer-Nature, which in any aspect is much better than the conditions of CRC (and also Springer-Nature is also not a charitable entity)...

Yes, of course it is the best to negotiate with the publisher before you work. But this is often already done by the editors of a book. So chapter authors should ask for reading the original contract with the publisher before they start their work, otherwise a bad surprise may come at the end.

No copyright, no income for authors of books applies equally to journal articles. This discussion on RG and recently on journals in the Guardian, reminds me of the individual farmers noticing the differential between their sales price and what is paid in the supermarket for say a litter of milk. The added value is mostly in the processing, marketing and sales network. Of course, we can publish our books or articles with small publishers or by ourselves. But we will spent an awful lot of time on the publishing process and are unlikely to reach global readership.

One way for commodity producers to capture more of the added value, is to create a producer (e.g. farmer) cooperative covering the entire value chain as is relative common in the agrarian sector including the dairy industry. Several cooperatives operate now as a substantial global player.

Further, journals published in the past by universities or professional associations (I published in two of them) currently belong the oligopoly of the big five in our field. Same trend as outside the ivory tower, in oil (seven sisters), cars, cereals, flowers and many other sectors.

Finally, I did get offers from small publishing houses to produce a book for a (small) percentage of the sales. Such offers typically included sharing in the cost of manuscript preparation, in other words sharing in the risk.

On a last note. My most read publication by far is a self-published small book. However, in this case the considerable authors cost including travel were covered by a third party.

Well, at least in journals I hitherto always got a proper pdf of my articles for private use, so the practice of some book publishers is apparently worse...

However, I agree that essentially the whole current scientific publishing system gets more and more imbalanced: While the profit rates of the big international publishes are higher than ever, they do less and less work (because they source it out to us scientists) with continuously decreasing quality (because they replace qualified well-paid staff in industrialized countries with cheaper staff in India and elsewhere in SE Asia that is also highly volatile). Perhaps it is really time for science to gain back control over the scientific publication process - certainly not as individual scientists, but perhaps via the big scientific associations.

I can recommend Pensoft Publishers, Sofia. The head is zoologist first and business man second and he is aware of needs and thinking of scientific authors. I brought out a book 15 years ago which is way back, I admit. They grew a lot in the mean time and the web page looks rather professional. So I cannot say whether conditions have changed. Anyway I negotiated at eye level, got the pdf, had nothing to pay extra (though the number of printed copies was only 300 at that time), the layout process was in close communication between me and the layout man and the book was made in hardback with a very nice and attractive cover.

Of course I did not expect to earn money and we should all be aware that book publishers have to calculate whether they can make money out of a scientific book title or not. But we as authors should always demand respect and fairness. What I read here about CRC does not sound attractive for my next book ....

When I read the last sentence by Herbert, I got the following idea: A short way to an improvement of the situation could be a rating portal of scientific publishers (on a web page). It might make publishers work on their reputation among scientists. No authors, no books/articles, no business. It could bring some power to authors.

However, this would probably not substantially change the business model and the relation of these companies to their "suppliers". So I definitely encourage self-organisation. Why not build a network of universities that jointly publish journals on different subjects? If employees of a university do the writing for free anyway, but indirectly paid by the university (or third-parties but anyway), why shouldn't these very insitutions get the benefit from that work directly? The involved universities could get high-quality but (comparatively) low-cost journals. Readership could be big if the network is just big enough. So, who's in? :-)

Wouldn't that be a case for an EU-funded project? (Involvement of other countries' universities shouldn't be a problem, I guess.)

Thank you Jurgen and Colleagues for this informative discussion.