[Tips] Publication – Publishing Scam

Grad students, have you ever received an email from a publishing company claiming to have selected your thesis/dissertation for publication? If you have written a Masters or doctoral thesis, you probably have. I have received tons of emails like that in the last 10 years.* It seems that end of semester is the peak time for “bad” publishing companies to send such emails. Sorry to bring you bad news, no established and quality publishers will actively solicit publications from doctoral/masters thesis!

What to do with such email? My advice to you: kick it to a spam folder!
Especially if it comes from Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP), VDM Verlag, AV Akademikerverlag, Scholar Press Publishing, FastBook Publishing, Alphascript Publishing, Betascript Publishing…. and so many other names the same company uses.

Why? They are “academic author mills”. They produce publications without peer-review. In term of their operation, it is not “hoax” per se, most likely they will publish a thesis on a print-on-demand basis (and market through Amazon). But their offer isn’t based on any assessment of the manuscript/work. Also you risk losing the rights to publish “properly” elsewhere.

Check these links for detailed answers:
http://www.slate.com/…/lap_lambert_academic_publishing_my_t…

http://scholarlyoa.com/…/lambert-academic-publishing-a-mus…/

http://chrisnf.blogspot.ca/2009/06/academic-spam.html

For the list of other questionable publishers (who also publish many ‘bad’ journals), check this: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

For VDM or LAP, in particular, their subsidiaries are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing

* These days, some “unquestionable” publishers also scour your academia.edu profile, your conference presentations, and email you that they want to publish or re-publish your papers.

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