Q: If I have published an article in a journal, can I include it as a chapter of a new book?

Hello Maxim – Welcome to the forum! And straight off, thanks for the impeccably framed query. We did not need to make even one edit to it. You are clearly a writer – and seemingly an accomplished one at that. :-)

Coming to your query, it would depend – and here’s what it would depend on.

If you have published your article in a paywalled journal, the copyright has transferred to the journal. So, if you wish to publish that article as-is, you may need to take their permission for doing so. If however you published in an open access (OA) journal, you may be able to use your article based on the Creative Commons (CC) licenses of the journal. [For more information on CC licenses in general, you may refer to this resource: About The Licenses] For information on the journal’s CC licenses in effect, you will need to refer to the journal site. You may also wish to write to the editor for permission to republish your piece, even if simply to inform them (out of courtesy).

Now, it’s not clear if you wish to publish the previous article as-is or if you wish to make some changes to it, if this is indeed an edited book. If the book is an anthology, you may not need to make any changes to it. In that case, you will need the permission of the journal. If however the book (editor) requires you to modify the contents of the chapter (among other reasons, to avoid permission/copyright issues), you will need to revise it.

To what extent you will need to revise depends on you and also on how recent the previous article is. If it’s relatively recent, you may not be able to modify it too much. In that case, perhaps you could make it a perspective piece, using the previous article as a base. If the article is not very recent, you may need to write an updated version of it, including new understanding and findings from the field. In both cases, you will need to cite the original article, with a note stating that the chapter is based on the original article.

Hope that helps. All the best for the book version!

Related queries:

• Should I accept an invitation to publish my academic work as a book?
• Should I accept an invitation to publish my journal article as a book?
• Is it self-plagiarism if I publish a journal article based on a book that I've co-authored?

Hello again, Maxim! As you seem to be quite a bit of a writer, we were wondering if you would wish to contribute to our site in some way. If yes, we’d like to talk about two ways in which you could do so:

• Pen a story for our Researchers and Their Stories section. Here, researchers, academics, and scholars share narratives – from the professional to the personal – on various aspects of the academic life. You may go through some stories here.
• Write an article as a Guest Contributor in case you are a senior researcher or scholar. This could be about an area in which you have experience and expertise, and would like to share it for the benefit of others. If so, you may find out more here.

Thanks in advance/anticipation!