Contract
Your book has been reviewed positively by the punctum books co-directors and you received an email letting you know that we accepted your manuscript for publication, contingent upon the future receipt of the completed manuscript and its favorable review by our Editorial Advisory Board. Congratulations!
Once you acknowledge that you want to continue the publication process with us, we will send you a contract. Our contract is compact because we try to avoid as much as possible the legalese that clutters the book contracts you may be used to. Also, because we are an Open Access press some things in it may be unfamiliar or surprising. So here we provide an overview of FAQs about our contract.
1. Grants and Copyright
You will see the phrase "irrevocable non-exclusive license" used several times here. The license is "irrevocable" because of the Open Access nature of the publication. Once the publication exists in the public domain under a Creative Commons license, we (or anyone else) can no longer withdraw it from circulation. The license is "non-exclusive" because you are welcome to license your original manuscript in other ways to other venues. You always retain the copyright on your own work.
2. Distribution and Archiving
Your book and its metadata will live in different formats both in digital and meat space. We are continuously expanding the repositories in which your publication is deposited.
At present our entire catalog is available via OAPEN, the primary repository for open access books. Part of our catalog is available through Project MUSE, and we are currently in the process of importing our entire catalog to JSTOR and Google Books. For UK educational institutions, our catalog is also available through RNIB Bookshare.
The metadata of our catalog live primarily on Thoth. This is also the place where you can download your own metadata record, for example when you want to import your book into bibliography managers such as Zotero or BibDesk. All our metadata are also stored on DOAB and some on CNKI. OCLC ingests our metadata from OAPEN and when you find your book here you can also check in how many library holdings around the world it is present.
Our books are printed via KDP, which used to be an independent print-on-demand printer but was acquired and renamed a few years by Amazon. Many of our authors ask us whether there are alternatives and the unfortunate reality is that there are none. The only competitor coming close to KDP's quality and worldwide reach is Lighning Source, which is equally owned by a multinational corporation. We have tried to find local alternatives to KDP, but these are simply not scalable, less reliable, and require much more hands-on management from our side, for which we simply do not have time. So for the moment, we are stuck with KDP. On the flipside, your book will be available worldwide in almost any digital bookstore plugged into Amazon's distribution network.
We are also steadily expanding the presence of our books in meatspace stores. There are multiple independent bookstores around the world who regularly stock our books, and thanks to our partnership with Faherty & Associates, our books are now also increasingly available in bookstores around the US West Coast. You can check with your favorite local bookstore if they want to stock our (your!) book, they get 40% discount on the list price and (mostly) free shipping.
After reviewing the contract please fill in your address in the first paragraph and sign/date at the bottom.