MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 10--UPDATED
I, at least, intend to boycott them, and here's a few examples of why:
1. CUP has a policy, in author bios, of not listing publishers of an author's books unless they were published by CUP. I only learned of this petty stupidity when the editor of a CUP volume to which I was contributing informed the contributors of this fact. This editor, to her credit, objected, and finally CUP gave in (at least for this volume!).
2. CUP has taken to inserting clauses into contracts requiring authors to keep the terms of the contract confidential! I had never seen such a clause before in a publication contract. I struck that clause in the last contract from them I was asked to sign.
3. CUP (unlike, for example, OUP and Routledge) will not permit papers to be shared on Internet platforms like SSRN until one year after publication.
4. A Portuguese graduate student wanted to translate an essay of mine that had appeared in a CUP volume a number of years ago, in order to make it available on an open-access Brazilian journal. The student was offering to undertake the translation without compensation. CUP wanted 190 GBP for the rights to translate this less than 20-page essay. I told the student not to bother, and that I would provide other work from publishers that were not engaged in price-gauging of scholars that can not afford such extravagant fees.
I have other doubts that are more specific to the philosophy catalogue, but I'll save those for another day. In any case, authors may want to look elsewhere and also to be alert to and protest some of the policies described above.
UPDATE: CUP relented on point #4, after I pressed them quite hard. First, they reported that half the fee, so 95 GBP, was for me. I said I'd be glad to waive that, and I suggested they reduce their portion of the fee to 10 GBP which I would then pay myself. They reported that they needed to charge 95 GBP in order to cover their administrative costs, which I pointed out wasn't plausible: clearly they were looking to make a profit at the expense of a graduate student and an institution that could ill afford this expense. At that point, they relented in this instance, but it does suggest that authors may have some leverage in cases where scholars without substantial resources want to make Anglophone work available to scholars and students working in other languages.
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