Friends,
Several queries from recent PhD graduates remind me that it is once again the season for Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) and Verlag Dr Mueller (VDM) to contact every recent graduate with an offer to publish their thesis.
While I must still respond to Alpay Er’s query on predatory publishers and fake conferences, LAP and VDM are something else. Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Dr Mueller are not predatory publishers in the strict sense of the definition, but they do prey on PhD students — as well as on recent bachelor’s and master’s graduates. They run a massive business that focuses on publish thesis projects in a print-on-demand format while encumbering copyright. (LAP and VDM also publish reprint versions of Wikipedia content for sale through Amazon and others. While they do sometimes publish reprints of useful material with lapsed copyright protection, this is a small part of their business, and finding the valid content is like river basin diamond mining. Finding a diamond requires sifting through tons of muck.)
LAP and VDM publish theses under circumstances adverse to the authors. Their business model is so troubling that I see it as nearly fraudulent. They trawl the web sites of universities looking for thesis projects by recent graduates — bachelor’s theses, master’s theses and doctoral theses are all the same to LAP and VDM. They send enthusiastic invitations to every graduate offering to publish a book, sight unseen. VDM has a number of imprints, but none of these gives authors any serious impact or visibility.
There are several issues here. The first is that anyone who graduates from any accredited university has greater credit for completing a thesis than for publishing with LAP or VDM.
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. While many European universities require that the thesis be published 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 the faculty for this purpose. This was difficult or very expensive in the days of hot-lead type. This fact delayed the award of the PhD for many students and often made the award impossible for poor students. This is no longer the case.
Since the shift to photomechanical typesetting and offset printing in the 1960s, universities took on the publishing requirement. Costs dropped even further in the era of desktop publishing, rapid offset print production, or print quality photocopy production. Many universities print 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 a larger press run with greater circulation than is available either through LAP or VDM. Full copyright belongs to the author. There is an occasional exception for some forms of funded research where the funder requires copyright, but that is determined at the start of the project. Copyright never belongs to the thesis publishing agency.
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.
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. At ProQuest, however, authors retain 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.
Limited publication by universities or ProQuest fulfils the publishing requirement, but it does not constitute sufficiently wide publication to prohibit later publication of journal articles, books, or monographs. Journals and academic publishers do not deem these thesis publications to constitute prior publication to the detriment of articles or books.
This leads to the second problem. Publishing with LAP and VDM make it impossible to publish material in other forms. LAP and VDM are commercial publishers. Publishing a title with a commercial press renders the text unpublishable by journals or by other publishers. In addition, LAP and VDM hold sufficient copyright control to raise problems for other use.
Finally, there is a third problem. Anyone who has been published by LAP or VDM is likely to damage his or her own reputation when seeking academic positions. To publish with LAP and VDM is evidence that an author does not understand academic publishing. In a competitive job market, most universities use simplistic heuristics to cut applications to a manageable short list. In many universities, seeing LAP or VDM on an CV is a bad sign. Anyone with LAP or VDM on their CV or bibliography should take the citation OFF. It doesn't help. It generally works against hiring, tenure, or promotion.
There has been some 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
There are many good publishers. One way to look at publishers is to use 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. Set the "type" box to “forlag,” (publisher) then adjust the other settings by area or discipline or country. It is also possible to search publishers by name. There is a URL with the web site for nearly every publisher in the system:
Here are the Level 2 publishers.
AltaMira Press
Ashgate
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Berg Publishers
Berghahn Books
Blackwell Verlag
Boydell & Brewer
Brepols
Brill Academic Publishers
Brill Nijhoff
Cambridge University Press
C.H. Beck
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.
Intersentia
James Currey Publishers
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Johns Hopkins University Press
Kluwer Law International
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Librairie Droz
LIT Verlag
Manchester University Press
Max Niemeyer
Mentis Verlag GmbH
M. E. Sharpe
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
Universitätsverlag Winter
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
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Verlag J. B. Metzler
Verso
Wallstein Verlag
Walter de Gruyter
Waxmann Verlag
Wilhelm Fink Verlag
Yale University Press
Zed Books
In addition, there are thousands of legitimate and respected Level 1 publishers.
Please share this information about Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Doktor Mueller. This goes around every year as people graduate and the folks at LAP and VDM trawl university web sites looking for naïve and hopeful authors. They 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. Both LAP and VDM are predatory in this respect. If you have doctoral students, please warn them about LAP and VDM. If you are a recent graduate, don't get fooled!
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 for nearly two decades since he did his master's. He has an important new book in print. He did his PhD at Yale. Then, he took five years from the completion of the PhD to the finished book with at University of Michigan 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. Researchers in some fields can't restructure the thesis into a book. Instead, they focus on 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 who work in universities don't generally write for the money. We don't produce manuscripts that get optioned for Hollywood. Russell Crowe is not going to star with Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman in the big-screen version of "User-Centered Design Methods for Public-Transport Ticket Systems."
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 just as any good publisher will evaluate your manuscript … 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, you should wonder whether something is wrong — or at least a bit off.
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 | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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