EDITOR-IN-CHIEF’S POLICY ON COMPLETELY REWRITING

FIRST EDITION ARTICLES

Authors are expected to use as much of the first edition text as they can. There is plenty of good prose in the first edition, and, as I have explained many times in the past, with justification from OUP’s production staff, revisions must be submitted on the galleys. This approach to revision must be the first option taken by all authors. Hence, revision is not to be seen as an opportunity to make stylistic changes in first-edition prose that is otherwise perfectly good and sound, nor is it an invitation simply to jettison text that an author now feels does not sound right. Doing revisions on the galleys according to OUP guidelines can be a bit time-consuming. But not doing so actually increases the overall work required to get the revised edition in shape for reprinting – OUP staff is well schooled in inserting revisions of the kind required, and completely new text causes immense problems of notation, cross-referencing, special symbols, and other formatting issues that are already solved with the first-edition text.

As the revision guidelines say, in cases where there are “extensive revisions to the previous text (i.e., not merely adding, moving, or deleting chunks of text but intensive, line-by-line changes), it can be resubmitted as a completely new file.” However, this allowance is the decision of the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia, not the decision of the authors. I spent hours with Consulting Editors on determining the extent of changes for each article, and the revision categories that resulted from those discussions are a matter of contract. I went through this procedure so that I could have a sense of what articles might in fact need extensive revision. To disregard these revision categories and completely rewrite papers is to cause more work for everyone, including the authors themselves, who will very likely be asked to redo their revisions on the galleys, as originally requested. When I have received complete rewrites, in more than 95% of the cases, I have seen that the “extensive, line-by-line changes” are unnecessary and involve stylistic modifications, simple deletions, and rearrangements; the truly new material is most often easily inserted according to the revision guidelines. This is not to say that there have not been acceptable complete rewrites, but these have been few. If an author believes that the revision necessitates a complete rewrite, he/she should first send a substantial sample to me and the consulting editor for the area. I will then decide, in consultation with the editor, whether a complete rewrite is allowable.