This one’s mostly for the search engines as I’m sure most of my readers don’t need to hear this.
I keep getting this spam email sent to me:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Yasmine Watson
Date: February 2, 2012 2:15:30 AM EST
To:
Subject: Our Publication Offer: Your end-of-studies workDear Essam Hallak,
Some time ago I offered you the possibility of making your academic paper
entitled «Beyond Boundaries A Philosophical Mapping of the PreModern City of
the Levant» submitted to McGill University Montreal as part of your
postgraduate studies available as printed book. Our publishing company is
interested in your subject area for future publications. Since we did not
hear back from you, I am now wondering if you received my first email.I would appreciate if you could confirm your interest in our publishing
house and I will be glad to provide you with detailed information about our
services.I am looking forward to receiving a positive response from you.
Best Regards,
Yasmine Watson
Acquisition EditorLAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing GmbH & Co. KG
Heinrich-Böcking-Str. 6-8
66121, Saarbrücken, GermanyFon +49 681 3720-310
Fax +49 681 3720-3109y.watson(at)lappublishing.com / www.lap-publishing.com
Handelsregister Amtsgericht Saarbrücken HRA 10752
General unlimited partner: VDM Management GmbH
Managing directors: Thorsten Ohm (CEO), Dr. Wolfgang Philipp Müller, Esther
von Krosigk
They keep sending me this bizarre spam email. If I’m going to take OUP to task for their restrictive IP policies, I should also say something about these much more dangerous presses.
Lambert is a print on demand publisher, not exactly vanity press in the sense that they don’t charge authors up front. But in terms of advancing a young scholar’s career, they might as well be a vanity press. They claim your intellectual property and publish it without proper peer review or academic editorial process, which means that they have just devalued your thesis that you might otherwise have revised, improved, and published in a more appropriate scholarly outlet (in whole or in part). This is no small thing, as your thesis is the cornerstone of the next few years of your academic career, at least in disciplines where theses appear as books.
Do not publish with Lap Lambert or other self-publication schemes. It won’t help your career, it won’t impress hiring or postdoc committees, and it won’t get you read by your peers. Though you might get a nicely bound book.
Some other threads on the topic:
http://chrisnf.blogspot.com/2010/06/lambert-academic-publishing-continues.html
http://littlecomputerscientist.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/investigating-lambert-academic-publishing-with-google-square/
http://sandcountyfrank.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/academic-spam-redux-lambert-academic-publishers-responds/
http://www.writingnetwork.edu.au/content/email-lap-offering-publish-my-masters-thesis
Interesting. I had a conversation with a German PhD student the other day, and she was saying that all German students must “publish” their thesis in order to graduate (the idea is that the knowledge will then be more accessible). VDM/Lap have provided a means to do this for students who must fulfill this requirement. I was a little shocked by this, and I haven’t really looked into it, but your post makes me want to. I know that many Ethiopian students at Addis Ababa University make use of these self-publishing outfits, but I don’t believe there is any requirement to publish in order to graduate there.
Erin: Good points about location specificity. These kinds of publishers may serve useful institutional functions outside the Canada/US context. But since they repeatedly spammed me (and presumably lots of others), I think they crossed over from “useful” to “harmful.”
I have written the following comment on one of the Lamart publications that they claim is a book and posted on amazon. It is relevant for all their publication and have posted below.
3.0 out of 5 stars Lambart publishing, 8 Feb 2012
By Sofia – See all my reviews
This review is from: Deconstructive Discourse of Content as Reflected in: Haddis Alemayehu’s “Fikir Eske Mekabir” (Paperback)
I have came across many of the manuscripts published by this “publisher”. Some of them which appeared in amazon as books (in the format under review) are MA thesis of my students. I have been approached by this “publisher” to publish through them. However they are not serious. They don’t do a peer review of the thesis when they claim them as books and posted them at amazon. In some of them they don’t do even proper formatting and language checking. So they don’t seriously publish books. Rather tag them colourful cover pages and ridiculous price and post them in places like amazon. So I will advise customers not to be tricked by this publisher and believe that the “book” you see here has passed through due process of publishing. If you wanna buy it see it for yourself. In fact you can check the web site of the university where that author has written what you see here as a “book” as his or hers final year thesis (eg. See addis ababa university web site) and can download it for free as it is a free public property. I have written this because I am disappointed with lack of professionalism by this “publisher” which attempts to make quick money by tricking customers. Would be glad if any one can distributed this comment as widely as possible.
The writer is a professor at addis ababa university.
Some universities have warned their grad students againts them:
http://www.webcitation.org/5rnHpZULQ
And in Australia they exclude their publication from meeting the requireemtns for submission to the HERDCE:
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/performance/herdc/criteria
I’ve read references about Latin-American universities putting up similar advice. Yes, you definitively shouldn’t publish with them