I have been fortunate to have lived a fairly long life during which I have produced not just a bunch of books and articles published quite respectably but also innumerable short pieces, columns and notices, that in time I began to collect in various “places” of the Web. Some of these eventually became printed/published missives, but many just remained scribbles, so to speak, that I might return to and expand, edit, reshape, and so forth and then submit to a publication. Now and then I would pick one of these archived pieces and submit them to a magazine, journal, newspaper, or similar forum, usually after editing and reshaping it a good bit.
The first printed works of mine appeared in various newsletters. For example, while still an undergraduate at Claremont Men’s College in the 1960s a friend and I “published” such a newsletter titled “Logica.” Others followed, culminating, in time, with some friends taking over the publication of Reason Magazine which graduated into a pretty formidable monthly printed magazine that’s still around (though I am not in it much any longer).
Among an early printed forum where my writing was welcome by the editors was The Freeman. I believe my first few pieces appeared in it in the 1970s. After this The Freeman published me quite frequently. And it reviewed my books, published letters addressing my arguments, etc., and so forth. To put it mildly, I was welcome in its pages and had even been asked to take part in conferences in the company of such libertarian luminaries as Israel Kirzner, Ed Opitz, John Hospers, Hans Sennholz, et al.
With different editors the frequency of my pieces in The Freeman varied. Some found me lacking in religious conviction and practically banned me from the magazine; some just found my style unpleasant or otherwise objectionable; some took a dislike to me, period.
More recently, with yet a new editor, my submissions began to be rejected on the grounds that I had posted some version of them on the Web! No, they weren’t published in a magazine or book or such but they did show up in some collection of “blogs” (whatever these are supposed to be), sometimes without my knowledge. Since many libertarians do not believe in intellectual property rights, they often just took what they liked and placed them in some forum on the web, not even asking my permission. The anarchy that had emerged regarding what may be used and by whom produced a paper trail, so to speak, over which I had no control.
So now it seems that just because some piece I wrote and have been waiting to submit for publication appeared somewhere on the Web, some editors consider it published and my submission of it to their publication inappropriate. Apparently they do extensive searches to check if any version of what I send them has seen the light of day, as it were. And if they find evidence that such is the case, some will reject the piece, while others do not care one whit about it. So long as the point made in the missive is worth showing readers, “let’s go for them” is one attitude in evidence, but at other times it is more like “only strictly and fully original material is a candidate for us.” I am not asking to be paid--although at times I do receive compensation--so I tend to be sort of laissez-faire about it all. After all, what matters most is to spread good ideas around!
It does, however, annoy me that some editors engage in the detective work that unearths some remote forum where some version of a submission has appeared. (It is even more annoying when they intimate that their “discovery” is evidence of my having attempted to hoodwink them.)
So, the gist of this missive is that I am pretty confused as to what is welcome, what unwelcome procedure when it comes to submitting works to publications in our time. Never mind that I have been published in some of the forums--magazines, journals, newspapers, etc.--for a rather long time. The new turks at the helm appear to seek out various ways of rejecting submissions and one such way is to scout the Web and see if there is anything around on it that looks like it counts as prior publication. Gotcha!
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We are delighted to present Lessons in Freedom, essays by Dr. Tibor Machan, for your pleasure.
Tibor R. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair at Chapman University and is Senior Contributing Editor for The Daily Bell website. http://tibormachan.rationalreview.com/ & http://szatyor2693.wordpress.com/
