Thoughts about the author mill Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP)
I became aware of author mills or vanity publishers during my first secondment as a liaison librarian at AUT. Author mills spam academics asking for the rights to publish their research using print on demand technology and sell them for exorbitant prices. They also sell poorly produced books that are in the public domain and can be accessed in multiple formats in the the Gutenberg Project. One example is LAP of which VDM Verlag is a subsidiary.
I discovered that we had some shoddy looking books published by VDM on the shelves, even one of their Wikipedia books which are just a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular topic. I made sure that book was weeded! I became fascinated with this shady world of academic publishing. I read blog posts about VDM. I looked on Amazon for them where there were thousands of their books on the most obscure subjects. I even chastised one of our suppliers for listing them for sale on their website. After some encouragement I made a long list of dodgy publishers on the team wiki-page for staff to refer to when ordering so that we didn't buy any more.
At the library I currently work at there are two VDM books, one of which is actually very popular with students. It's someone's thesis about teaching in NZ called From theory to practice: the bicultural reality. It's not available online in any institutional repository, unlike many other books/theses that VDM publish. Recently a lecturer asked for a book, another thesis, published by VDM. I googled it and was happy to discover that the full PDF was in Tuwhera, AUT library's repository.
Why would any author agree to VDM publishing their work? A quick google search will bring up a trove of information on Wikipedia and blog posts, etc. about how dodgy they are. Not only that, the books are so poorly done. It's basically just having your thesis printed in A5 and then having a cover put on it. That's it. No editorial work done, no proof reading. One book we have is missing the cover pages to the thesis, another one has 26 blank pages at the end. There's no index. The type is always too small. Grammar and spelling errors are common in the blurb on the back cover.
A lot of libraries got scammed by VDM around 10 years ago. I had a look on the national catalogue Te Puna and there were hundreds of books there, mostly published in 2008. Of course many of these are research works which are available in various NZ university repositories. It seems that libraries are wiser now. VDM Verlag are now known as OmniScriptum - being infamous of course they would change their name. I don't see any of their books in the catalogues I have checked.
I discovered that we had some shoddy looking books published by VDM on the shelves, even one of their Wikipedia books which are just a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular topic. I made sure that book was weeded! I became fascinated with this shady world of academic publishing. I read blog posts about VDM. I looked on Amazon for them where there were thousands of their books on the most obscure subjects. I even chastised one of our suppliers for listing them for sale on their website. After some encouragement I made a long list of dodgy publishers on the team wiki-page for staff to refer to when ordering so that we didn't buy any more.
At the library I currently work at there are two VDM books, one of which is actually very popular with students. It's someone's thesis about teaching in NZ called From theory to practice: the bicultural reality. It's not available online in any institutional repository, unlike many other books/theses that VDM publish. Recently a lecturer asked for a book, another thesis, published by VDM. I googled it and was happy to discover that the full PDF was in Tuwhera, AUT library's repository.
Why would any author agree to VDM publishing their work? A quick google search will bring up a trove of information on Wikipedia and blog posts, etc. about how dodgy they are. Not only that, the books are so poorly done. It's basically just having your thesis printed in A5 and then having a cover put on it. That's it. No editorial work done, no proof reading. One book we have is missing the cover pages to the thesis, another one has 26 blank pages at the end. There's no index. The type is always too small. Grammar and spelling errors are common in the blurb on the back cover.
A lot of libraries got scammed by VDM around 10 years ago. I had a look on the national catalogue Te Puna and there were hundreds of books there, mostly published in 2008. Of course many of these are research works which are available in various NZ university repositories. It seems that libraries are wiser now. VDM Verlag are now known as OmniScriptum - being infamous of course they would change their name. I don't see any of their books in the catalogues I have checked.
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