Mulling over Book Mills and Publishing Your Academic Writing

An Academic Book Mill and Publishing Decisions
The desire to dig up abandoned writing from the graveyard of old hard drives and outdated computers is a noble one: all that work just may be interesting or useful to someone, and it makes good sense to bring it back to life. This very topic is addressed in a short article in the Guardian at http://bit.ly/1pwfAor. The focus is on Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP), but while LAP definitely offers a means of printing texts such as theses and dissertations and offering them to potential readers, it seems uncertain whether publishing a text through LAP can quite ‘set it free’ as the author suggests.

In fact, publishing your thesis or dissertation with LAP appears to entail transferring the exclusive right to print the text to the publisher, which means that you will not be able to publish your work elsewhere, even a chapter of it in an academic or scientific journal. LAP does not pay you for this right, but it does cover the expense of publishing, using a low cost print-on-demand system. The company also pays royalties, at least theoretically, but if sales are low (as I gather they often are), authors receive LAP credits instead of payment, so it is unlikely to prove a profitable venture. In addition, LAP is in many cases printing theses and dissertations that are already available on university web sites, and the company is known for printing material which can easily be accessed free of charge online, such as Wikipedia articles. Technically legal, but ethically questionable, this is not the sort of activity one wants associated with a publisher if the reason for publication is to improve a CV and be taken seriously in intellectual terms. In addition, a LAP publication is far from inexpensive (although if the author buys many copies, the price is reduced for other purchasers) and is neither reviewed nor proofread by the publisher, as a science reporter who published his undergraduate thesis with LAP describes: read more about his experience at http://slate.me/22nFdJx.

All in all, LAP seems more a printing service than a publisher, but if you are looking for a means to make educational material available to students or if you have already published much of your doctoral research as articles in scholarly journals and are now seeking a way to publish the thesis as a whole, LAP may be a valid choice. If you do decide to publish with a book mill such as LAP, remember that the publisher’s lack of attention to the quality of the text does leave the power in your hands to ensure a decent publication. Since you, not the publisher, will be responsible for editing and formatting the document prior to printing, make sure you proofread it – or have somebody else proofread it – with extreme care, correcting the typos, spelling errors and formatting inconsistencies indicative of an amateur publication. However, if you are doing all this work yourself in any case, there are self-publishing services out there that offer better royalties and allow the author to set the price of the book and retain copyright, so it is wise to shop around a little and make an informed decision that you will not regret.