Friends,
Following my note yesterday, I received a sad letter from a PhD graduate who permitted Lambert Academic Press (LAP) to publish his thesis. He commented that his supervisors said that this was fine – and that it is better to publish anywhere than not.
This is incorrect. If no one buys the book, it is not better to publish it, and evidence suggests that LAP and Verlag Dr. Mueller (VDM) sell nearly no copies.
As I wrote yesterday, these two publishing firms are not vanity presses in the sense that people do not pay to publish their books – but they are predatory publishers. They take advantage of the desire of recent graduates to publish. They also take advantage of the fact that younger scholars are often ignorant of serious academic publishing norms, the relative prestige of publishers, and so on.
LAP and VDM exist primarily to publish PhD thesis projects in a print-on-demand basis. When they acquire the rights to publish, they encumber copyright in a way that makes further publishing in book form or journal articles difficult or impossible.
Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Dr Mueller are operations that exists to publish theses under circumstances adverse to the authors. Their business model is so troubling that I personally see it as nearly fraudulent. They trawl the web sites of all universities looking for recent thesis completions. When they find them, they send enthusiastic invitations to every author. VDM has a number of imprints, but none of these gives authors any serious impact or visibility.
The Swinburne Research web site tells the story … We put this up a few years ago as we discovered that every one of our PhD graduates was getting these letters, as were our staff who had recently graduated elsewhere.
http://www.research.swinburne.edu.au/researchers/resources/lap-publishing/
The text of our page is missing one important set of facts. Item 11 is incorrect. It should read:
“German and European universities that require book publication to confer the PhD generally publish the thesis book within the university as part of the PhD program. The university absorbs the cost and produces the book. In North America, research universities require students to deposit a copy of the PhD thesis with ProQuest Dissertation Publishing. This is deemed to meet the publication requirement. In all cases, the author retains full copyright. These publications involve limited press runs or print-on-demand or microform publication at ProQuest. Journals and academic publishers do not therefore deem these thesis publications to constitute prior publication to the detriment of articles or books. In contrast, publishing with LAP or VDM raises copyright problems, while publishing a title with a commercial press renders the text unpublishable by journals or by other publishers.”
While many European universities require that PhD students publish the thesis as a book, it is the common practice for almost all universities to maintain a thesis series published under the aegis of the university, or of the faculty, for this purpose. This was difficult or impossibly expensive in the old days of hot-lead type, a fact that delayed the award for many students or made it impossible for poor students. This is no longer the case.
Since the shift to photomechanical typesetting and offset printing in the 1960s, universities took this on. Costs dropped even further in the era of desktop publishing and rapid offset print production. Many universities print somewhere between 100 and 300 copies of the thesis. Copies are often given away free to those who attend the PhD defence or disputation in universities where this is a public occasion. This is already a larger press run with greater circulation that either LAP or VDM, and full copyright belongs to the author — with the occasional exception of some forms of funded research.
In North America, all accredited research universities require students to submit a copy of the thesis to ProQuest, the former University Microfilms International UMI. This is deemed to constitute publication for the purposes of university requirements. Students retain full copyright. This is publication of the thesis in final approved form. This is an academic documentation service where only a few copies of the thesis tend to be sold. The microform or digital sales tend to be on the order of the number of units that LAP or VDM might sell - ProQuest won’t pay royalties, but at the low level of sales, neither do LAP or VDM. But at ProQuest, the author retains full copyright, and the thesis offprint is not deemed a publication. As a result, these publications do not make it impossible for students to transform the thesis into journal articles or book–length monographs.
There is a bit of debate on these issues at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,61017.msg1322018.html#msg1322018
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?ChronicleUser=6b4v5l6dffo0lpdf5r6fjf7776&/topic,45997.0.ht
As one commentator notes, if LAP or VDM took advantage of you when you were a recent graduate, you should take the citation OFF your CV. It doesn’t help. It works against you.
There are many good publishers. One way to look at publishers to evaluate them is by using Norway’s national research publishing web site. Go to the advanced search functions on the system at URL:
http://dbh.nsd.uib.no/kanaler/?search=advanced
Level 1 publishers are ordinary, decent presses. Level 2 publishers are the top presses with a global reputation. You set the “type” box to “publishers,” then you play with the other settings by area or discipline or country. You can also search by name. There is a URL with the web site for nearly every publisher in the system:
Here are the 89 Level 2 publishers.
AltaMira Press
Ashgate
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Berg Publishers
Berghahn Books
Blackwell Publishing
Blackwell Verlag
Bloomsbury Academic
Boydell & Brewer
Brepols
Brill Academic Publishers
C.H. Beck
Cambridge University Press
Columbia University Press
Continuum
Cornell University Press
D.S. Brewer
Duckworth
Duculot
Duke University Press
Edinburgh University Press
Edition text + kritik
Edward Elgar Publishing
Equinox Publishing
Falmer Press
Frank Cass Publishers
Franz Steiner Verlag
Harrassowitz Verlag
Hart Publishing Ltd
Harvard University Press
Honoré Champion
I.B. Tauris
IKO - Verlag
Intellect Ltd.
James Currey Publishers
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Johns Hopkins University Press
Kluwer Law International
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Librairie Droz
LIT Verlag
M. E. Sharpe
Manchester University Press
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Max Niemeyer
Mentis Verlag GmbH
MIT Press
Mohr Siebeck
Motilal Banarsidass
Mouton de Gruyter
Multilingual Matters
Ox Bow Press
Oxford University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Peeters Publishers
Pendragon Press
Polity Press
Praeger
Prentice-Hall
Presses Universitaires de France
Princeton University Press
Rodopi
Routledge
RoutledgeFalmer
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Sage Publications
Stanford University Press
Stauffenburg Verlag
Suhrkamp
Syracuse University Press
T&T Clark
University of British Columbia Press
University of California Press
University of Chicago Press
University of Hawai’i Press
University of Michigan Press
University of Minnesota Press
University of Pennsylvania Press
University of Washington Press
Universitätsverlag Winter
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Verlag J. B. Metzler
Verso
Wallstein Verlag
Walter de Gruyter
Waxmann Verlag
Wilhelm Fink Verlag
Yale University Press
Zed Books
Beyond this, there are thousands of legitimate publishers.
Please share this information about Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Doktor Mueller. This goes around every year when people graduate and the folks at LAP and VDM trawl university web sites looking for naïve and hopeful authors.
LAP and VDM rely on the fact that young researchers must publish, and they dangle the lure of a book in front of those too new to the research business to know better. This is a pattern for predatory publishers of all kinds. If you have doctoral students, please warn them about LAP and VDM. If you are a recent graduate, don’t let them fool you!
It takes real work to transform a PhD thesis into a book. This is even true of a first-rate thesis. I’ve been following the work of one outstanding researcher at University of Michigan for nearly two decades since he did his master’s. He has an important new book in print based on his PhD thesis.
He did his PhD at Yale. It took him five years to move from a completed PhD thesis to a finished book with a top university press.
Along the way, the press invited him to a new authors workshop, and he had the full support of a first-rate editor. It still took time. That’s the way things work.
Some researchers can’t restructure the thesis into a book. Instead, they generate serious journal articles. That’s another way that things work.
Samuel Johnson once wrote, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Those of us who work in universities don’t generally write for the money. There’s not much that we produce that has any hope for Hollywood film rights. I have heard rumors that Touchstone optioned the film rights to “User-Centered Design Methods for Public-Transport Ticket Systems.” The word in Hollywood is that Russell Crowe, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman will play the lead roles. But I don’t believe it.
The lack of revenue for what we write puts us in the “blockhead” column of Dr. Johnson’s equation. The one pay-off that we do get is pride in a job well done. That includes publishing with a serious press and a publisher whose interests align with our own. Researchers who want their work to count should evaluate publishers in the same way that any good publisher will evaluate your manuscript. Do it carefully.
If you receive a sudden invitation to publish your book from a publisher who has not seen the manuscript, met you at a conference, or spoken with you in person, something is wrong.
As my friends used to say about their weekly poker game, “If you don’t know who the sucker is when you sit down at the table, the sucker is you.”
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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