Why You Shouldn’t Publish with Lap Lambert, German Publishing House

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 work

Dear 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 Editor

LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing GmbH & Co. KG
Heinrich-Böcking-Str. 6-8
66121, Saarbrücken, Germany

Fon +49 681 3720-310
Fax +49 681 3720-3109

y.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Do not publish with Lap Lambert or other self-publication schemes.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

Public Speaking 101b

Okay, so I’ve been going to the speech therapist to see if there’s a way I can get back to giving talks while standing without my head spinning after a few minutes. Last time we worked on breathing, which helps but not enough.

Today, I learned that I still use volume for verbal emphasis. Which is stupid because my voice just breaks up and it’s as if my breath is leaking out of my head, and my voice doesn’t get a whole lot louder. If I switch to pitch, I do a lot better. But it sounds a lot easier than it actually is. You don’t just will yourself into another style. I’m not really a sing-songy talker. Also? I try and avoid that Canadian guy uptalking thing?

Not being able to “turn it up” is also a problem at work and in my social ife. People get conversational space by speaking up — whether we’re talking about dinner parties or meetings. I used to be right at home in that milieu but now I can’t do that, even though my voice “sounds” normal. So when a person facilitating a discussion in a formal setting like a meeting says “let’s just be cool and talk” it’s actually a real problem for me. So I have taken to raising my hand even when nobody else does. It sort of works. As for dinner parties, there have been a few nights where I just wear out and listen instead of talking.

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Other news forthcoming.

A “Tipping Point” Just Happened Inside My Throat

Well, that was fun. As predicted in October, the voice lift I had was temporary, and it’s pretty much gone now as far as I can tell. I’ve noticed it in my voice, which has lost strength, low end and is more hoarse (the guy at our local fruiterie asked if I had a cold as I was checking out the broccoli and mozzarella last night). More like what it was in the early fall. But the place I really notice–and miss–is swallowing. After paralysis, I relearned to swallow. Then I relearned again after the voice lift but it was much easier. Now I am relearning my original relearning. Especially not fun with pills and, oddly, long pasta noodles.

I phoned ENT at the General yesterday for my next one. I don’t have a date yet, but this time, I will be ready.

Media@McGill Occupy Event

Friday was an all-day event around #occupy organized by Media@McGill. You’ll get the full report on the M@M website, no doubt. But for me, some of the highlights:

1. The degree to which the event wasn’t just academic spectatorship of social change. Local Occupy Montreal activists showed up and participated in the workshops. The evening lecture by Chris Hedges and discussion panel (with Anna Feigenbaum, Patrick McCurdy and Nathalie Desrosiers) had about 300 people in attendance, many of whom had either been at #occupy or had engaged with it in some way.

2. I could only attend one of the workshops, by Nathalie Desrosiers, but I learned a lot about rights to assembly in Canada (I am still catching up on Canadian civics) and also about the politics of policing. As a bonus, I learned about the good work being done by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The CCLA is mostly supported through memberships, rather than big grants or donations, so if you like the work they do, consider joining.

3. The involvement of the #occupy activists in the main talk, from the various mic checks to the calls for people interested in the movement to come out and participate. As a friend pointed out to me last night, it was a nice reminder of how hierarchical academic events tend to be (after all, our field still has an essentially medieval structure) vs. the more lateral structures that the #occupy activists are trying to build.

4. Learning about the work of the Protest Camps Research Network. I expect the book will cast the current movement in an important historical light. While there are lots of cases of academics of various profiles (from sessionals to superstars) being involved in the movement, it is clear that at a theoretical level, we’re just catching up. Part of this is because Marxist ways of thinking have been assimilated rather easily into the institutional culture of the university, whereas anarchist models (see #3 above) have not. Sure, there are the autonomists and one could argue some of the poststructuralists, but the models of organization happening don’t, to my mind, yet have an adequate theoretical expression. To be clear, that’s the job of the academics. The activists have more pressing work to get done.

5. As a contribution to #4 above, let me just point out that for all the organized disorganization (or is that disorganized organization) that characterizes the #occupy movement, it heavily depends on massive, institutionalized and regularized infrastructures, from city transit systems, sewers and parks to the various telecommunications infrastructures, portals, standard and platforms that make the movement’s otherwise lateral organization and self-representation possible. I’m not sure what that means, except that I would love to know what an anarchist theory of infrastructure (or just an anarchistic infrastructure) would look like.

Things You Don’t Want to Hear at the University Library

Me [returning 1968 issue of Time Magazine]: this is really delicate. Are you sure you want me to put in the returns chute?

Library employee: Yeah, put it in and don’t worry about it. We’ve got that in digital and microfilm format.

I had originally gone to the issue because the digital version lacked some of the editorial content and all of the advertising and context.

UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time

I had occasion to read the October 4th, 1968 issue of TIME magazine (Canada edition!) cover to cover last night.* There is something magical about reading periodicals from another era, where what we experience as history is rendered as quotidian life, and you get a glimpse of how your own moment, as it is rendered as “news,” will look in retrospect. But what caught my attention most was an ad at the end of the issue, right inside the back cover. There was an ad for a computer:

 

The UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time

 

The ad is unremarkable compared to some other, more visually interesting UNIVAC ads, but I find it interesting as something in a newsmagazine aimed at an upper-middle class market.  Most of the ads are for cars, liquor and cigarettes, with airlines, luxury hotels (Montreal or Vancouver!) some fine watches and audio gadgets thrown in.  This wasn’t an ad for computer users, but a public relations campaign, designed to sell not just computers but computing for business.  What’s interesting is that the rhetoric essentially hasn’t changed–in terms of its propositions, the ad might as well be for IBM business solutions.  As to the sale of computing itself, that has, I think migrated to smartphone and tablet ads.  What was once a business plan is now a lifestyle.  Draw your own conclusions.

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*The OED led me to it, as I was doing a little digging on the history of the term “soundscape” for an essay.