Information for Potential Authors

OUP is a unique publishing company with good values. The aims of OUP are to support and disseminate scholarship and education. Owned by the University of Oxford, we have no shareholders and pay no dividend. We balance commercial and scholarly aims, offering our authors and readers excellent and innovative publishing in a stable and long term relationship.

We are committed to quality publishing. OUP’s reputation for quality and authority is second to none in the English-speaking scholarly world. Our academic law list is pre-eminent. Peer group review is fundamental to OUP’s publishing policy and is one of the major factors in the prestige associated with the Oxford name. While expanding our practitioner and student-orientated law publishing to match the success of our academic law list, we remain committed to maintaining these standards in all our publications.

We are committed to building long term relationships. In publishing generally, and legal publishing in particular, there is no guarantee that the publisher you sign a contract with will be the publisher you publish with, and no guarantee that the commitment shown to your book will not change significantly following an acquisition. In recent years large and small legal publishers have been bought and sold regularly. OUP offers unmatched stability; if you sign with us you will publish with us.

We are committed to innovative publishing, and we particularly welcome new ideas and feedback from our authors and readers.

We offer the benefits of publishing with a large and international publishing company.... International presence. We have offices and branches in over 50 countries around the world and 85% of OUP’s sales are made outside the UK. We market our law titles all around the globe, so that Oxford makes its law books available to a wider readership than any other publisher. OUP New York is the biggest University Press in North America, and we have major operations in Canada, Australia, and India, for example. Our two major distribution centres, at Cary in North Carolina and Corby in Northamptonshire hold some 60 million volumes at one time and employ the latest technology. Orders can be placed by telephone, fax, post, or email, and books are then dispatched rapidly. Books can now also be purchased over the internet.

Excellent international sales and marketing. OUP uses its international structure to market its law books to a wider readership than any other legal publisher. Each OUP office or branch carries out a range of promotional activities.

Marketing across legal markets.
Many legal monographs and textbooks appeal to practitioners, and many practitioner works sell well to individual scholars, libraries, and other institutions. Because OUP publishes across the range of legal markets, levels, and disciplines, we are uniquely placed to ‘cross-market’ and ‘cross-sell’ our legal books.

Marketing across disciplines.
Our publishing in fields related to law allows us to make the most of those books with interdisciplinary appeal. For example, our books in jurisprudence, EC law, and international law are also marketed as part of our distinguished philosophy, politics, and international relations publishing.

Market presence.
The prestige and size of the OUP academic lists and wide range of publishing ensures that bookshops welcome OUP sales representatives, and stock and support Oxford titles. This is particularly important at a time when bookchains are ordering centrally and are increasingly reluctant to see sales representatives from the smaller publishers. An established reputation for the quality of its authors and books is respected not only by booksellers but by librarians, review editors, and of course other scholars.

And we offer the benefits of publishing with a professional and focused law team.... Speedy decisions.
We give our authors speedy decisions on proposals and manuscripts, while also providing constructive feedback and criticism through peer review.

Quality of production and publication.
We are seeking to maintain the highest standards of professionalism at a time when author care and attention to detail are increasingly threatened by commercial pressures and the introduction of new technologies. We use professional legal copy-editors and proof-readers and have in- house specialist jacket and text designers. At the same time as maintaining standards, we are bringing publication times down and we keep in close touch with authors throughout the whole production process.

Working well with our authors.
We value our relationships with our authors; we consult authors at every stage of the editing and production process and we are constantly looking to improve the way we work.

Development.
We are willing to work very closely with our authors and we can offer detailed and constructive advice at various stages of the commissioning and writing process, when this is helpful. We also provide detailed advice on submitting typescripts and on any stylistic questions.

Continuing commitment.
Our interest in your book does not stop once it is published. We provide regular post-publication feedback, and we are keen to work with authors on new editions. We are committed to keeping Oxford law books in print, wherever possible.

Good terms.
We offer good contractual terms to our authors, and want to match the commercial viability of a book to the offer that we make.

Author discounts
We are pleased to offer preferential terms to authors of Oxford University Press. Our standard author discounts are:

40% off all OUP books for authors
25% off all OUP books for contributors

We want your experience of publishing your law book with OUP to make you reluctant to publish elsewhere. We aim to be as well known for the good ways in which we work with our authors and in which we publish our law books as we are for the quality of the books we publish.

Find out more about the publishing process