Dear Ken,
I suspected of such dangers and turned to this community in search for guidance.
Life is a beautiful voyage of constant learning, and I'm grateful for people like you and others of this community, always willing to share.
Please receive my best regards,
Victor G. Martinez
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Design
Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
Northumbria University
www.trophec.com
www.vgmtheory.com
Please think if your really need to print this email
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2014 9:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Academic publishing (unsolicited offers)
Dear Victor,
The publisher whose link you posted is not a serious publisher. If you look around the web site, you will find grammatical errors and spelling errors -- this is not a good sign in a publishing company billing itself as a press for scholars. You will also see that this publishing firm is controlled by Verlag Dr Mueller. Verlag Dr Mueller, VDM, Lambert Academic Press, LAP, and other publishing firms in the massive number of imprints they run are nothing but trouble for a reearcher seeking to publish a book. They trawl the web sites of universities looking for potential victims.
The real problem with this firm and other like it is the business model.
No reputable publisher will offer to turn a PhD thesis into a book without significant changes. When you have your PhD, it exists as a document in its own right. If you have earned a solid PhD at a good university, that is a respected distinction in its own right. Handing your PhD over to a publisher that does nothing but digitise your thesis and slap covers on it will usually mean turning the copyright over, and that will cost you dearly. Some of these publishers claim only a percentage of the copyright, but you will find that whatever it is you wish to publish will fall within the percentage they control and not the percentage you control.
The seemingly golden promises about huge visibility and marketing by such firms will mean nothing. A publisher such as this will simply add your book to a massive list, hoping to cash in on a few sales. The real payoff comes in exercising copyright control when you need to draw on your own research, now under their copyright. Despite all the promises of marketing the book, no one bothers to review a thesis reproduced as a book. These do not constitute serious research publications in the eyes of most journals or reviewing newspapers. There is not enough room to review the hundreds of thousands of serious, properly edited, well published books that publishers release every year -- and real publishers work hard to get these reviewed. No one reviews direct thesis-to-book products.
Moe important, an increasing number of universities look on these kinds of thesis-to-book products from dodgy publishers as a bad sign in a potential recruit. This shows that a researcher does not understand the publishing process, and publishing with a press such as this is taken as a sign of ignorance or even, at some universities, as something like padding a CV. These publishers rely on the fact that young researchers are eager to publish, and they rely on the fact that no one usually warns them to be wary of such offers. At the best, publishing with this press will do you no good. At the worst, it will damage your reputation.
If you want to know what kinds of problems are involved with VDM and publishers like VDM, please search the list archives. Just put the search phrase "VDM"
If you wish to transform your doctoral thesis into a book, there are opportunities. This takes work. Fortunately, there is a good book that tells you what this takes. William Germano has written the book you need. Germano is a former editor at University of Chicago Press, and at Routledge, now dean and professor of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union.
http://www.amazon.com/Dissertation-Chicago-Writing-Editing-Publishing/dp/0226288463
Many people hope that their thesis will become a book. Fewer than one per cent of all completed theses do become books, and only after serious revision. I know one author of a brilliant thesis whose thesis was turned into a book. The process took nearly five years -- with massive investments and grant support. Everyone agreed thesis was one of the most outstanding theses written at a university generally reckoned among the top ten research universities in the world. But it was a thesis, not a book. Now -- after a process much like the process Germano describes -- it is a book.
In the past, I have had some off-list communication from people who made the mistake of letting a press in the VDM and LAP group publish their PhD thesis. I would be deeply grateful if one of you would do our field the service of sharing your experience with the list. In the meantime, I hope that every doctoral student on the list knows that she or he will receive these offers -- avoid them like the curse they are. And I hope that supervisors warn their students about this.
No serious publisher will produce a real book from a thesis, unchanged and sight unseen.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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