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[sonofharpo]

To start, I know that "Self-plagiarism" is not the right term here, but it is a short-hand way to raise the topic I want to ask about: publishing material in more than one place. I am in the humanities in a literature field. On the Tenure Track, my book is in production and I'm up for review next year.
Here is my specific situation:
I believe that cut-and-paste reuse of one's own writing is not cool and maybe breaks copyright, although it happens all the time, especially in the humanities. But I distinguish in my mind between book chapters and journal articles, and since tenure committee in my field generally care little for book chapters, I have given them less weight in my thinking too. Thus, in the process of writing my book, I presented some early versions of the material at conferences, and some of those were worked by the organizers into books of collected essays (with Brill, Ashgate, Palgrave, etc--no university presses). Some of that material found a place in my book (coming out with an academic press--a good one in my field), but in a form I consider better and clearer, more final. I have not duplicated material from any journal articles, but three chapters are reworked from earlier book chapters. Because everything happens at the same time on the Tenure Track and books take a long while to appear, some of the forthcoming book is also forthcoming in book chapter form elsewhere.
I have two questions about this:
-how do I go about asking permissions for this sort of reworking of material? There is no verbatim repetition, but some pages are similar in logic, order, and examples, and would be clear as examples of reworking to anyone who put them side-by-side. I can't really ask for permission if the press has taken forever and a day to publish my chapter and it is still not out yet. What to do?
-Related to this, would it be acceptable (morally, professionally, intellectually etc) to reference my chapters in my book and say something like "an earlier version of this material is found in X collection (forthcoming)"?

Any thoughts on this situation would be helpful. Note: I am not asking about reworking material per se, but about the situation of having similar or reworked material forthcoming in two places, mostly because of the unpredictable timing of presses and contracts.

Thanks!

[bwwm1]

If they are not verbatim copies, then you still own the copyright, and therefore there is no need to ask for permission. However, as a courtesy (and I think this is the standard), it's good to say 'an earlier version....etc' in the book, even if it's not verbatim. In regard to timing, I have a journal article that I reworked into my book. The editors at the journal have taken so long to get to it, it'll come out after the book. They know about the book, but don't seem to care about its timing and I've definitely kept them informed. I just put the 'an earlier version...' thing into the book, even though the referenced article doesn't exist yet.

By the way, I don't think there's a problem with cut-and-paste from journal articles into books. The agreements I have seen for my articles have either explicitly given permission to republish any of the text in a book, or have not even asked to transfer copyright. Others probably have a different perspective on this, but I think it's fine. Perhaps the problem comes when it's about what counts for tenure.

[erzuliefreda]

I dealt with just this recently. The editor at the press for my book said if it was more than a few identical paragraphs then one needs to ask permission. I offered to rewrite the passages so that nothing was the same down to the sentence level, and he said that was great. I wasn't sure about including the "an earlier version..." bit in if one is not asking permission from the other anthology's press.

[janewales]

It's common for books to indicate that material has been previously published in some (not necessarily identical) form elsewhere. I do understand that right now, you don't know what will come out when, but some years from now, both versions will exist in print, so I would indeed write the "earlier version" footnotes in the book, and if you can't give publication dates, do use "forthcoming."

When I am sent tenure files to review, I don't like anything that looks like an attempt at CV padding; a note of the sort we're talking about here can head off a potentially negative reaction.