I was contacted by the Acquisition editor of Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) to publish my bachelor's thesis as a printed book. Is LAP any good? I have no idea about it; I have just heard that it's a freelance publishing house.
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8See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing (and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_mill )– JeffECommented Jul 19, 2012 at 15:46
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Funny. I got a similar mail yesterday.– user107Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 13:26
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i got one day before yesterday :O– viniCommented Jul 20, 2012 at 14:10
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5 Answers
No.
Publishing a thesis this way has no academic value whatsoever. (I.e., it will lead to no prestige, respectability, credit, etc. For academic purposes, it will not count as a published book, except for interfering with other forms of publication.) LAP's business model seems to be collecting as many theses and other unpublished academic documents as they can and then selling printed copies. I don't see much value to this, but it could be harmless if you do not plan to publish the thesis in any other form. If you like the idea of seeing your thesis for sale on amazon.com, then you should investigate other options as well and choose whatever seems like the best deal. However, it's unlikely that you'll make any money from this, and certainly no more than a small amount, so you'll be contributing more to the academic community if you make the thesis available for free online.
See also I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm for a detailed account of LAP's business practices.
answered Jul 19, 2012 at 15:42
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29+1 if you want your stuff to be seen/read, put it online for free, any other means will hinder accessibility.– ZenonCommented Jul 19, 2012 at 15:45
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2thanks ... i will reconsider my decision and putting it online for free seems better– viniCommented Jul 19, 2012 at 16:19
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6Note that putting it online also counts as publishing to some people and can interfere with preparing other scholarly publications based on the work. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 0:00
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To give more info i have already published 3 research papers in open access journals from my thesis– viniCommented Jul 20, 2012 at 3:59
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4Agreeing: if your goal is accessibility, such a publication is not good. If your goal is "credit/status", it is completely worthless. True, putting things on-line (on your own web page of some sort, or arXiv) is sometimes (aggressively, for ulterior purposes) construed as "bad publication". But good journals, while occasionally quibbling in some essentially meaningless ways, will not object to, for example, a "preliminary version" being on-line. (They may object to the fruits of their copyeditors being put on-line for free...) Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 23:03
No, it is not.
See this review from Jeffrey Beall:
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/05/lambert-academic-publishing-a-must-to-avoid/#more-921
(I highly recommend checking his list of 'predatory academic publishers' and reporting any new one you see to him).
Or this blog entry: http://chrisnf.blogspot.com/2010/06/lambert-academic-publishing-continues.html
It's what people started to call a 'predatory publisher'
It will bring you nothing but an expensive hard copy of what you apparently already published. Your local printing joint will probably do a better job, for less $.
answered Jan 9, 2014 at 19:50
Good god, no, avoid anything from Lambert like the plague.I bought a Lap Lambert publication online from Amazon without checking on the publisher first. It was on a topic that was relevant to my thesis and I felt I should check this book out. It's called "Aspects of Neuroses in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy" by a Mona Radwan from Cairo university. I paid a lot of money, a total of $154 for quick postage, because I was anxious to read it, thinking it might cover material in my own work, necessitating changes to my own thesis. I also thought that if it was an astute and well researched piece of work it might be very useful and take my own arguments in new and fruitful directions. But when I read the book I was appalled. You can see my one star review of it on Amazon if you care to read it, at http://www.amazon.com/Aspects-neuroses-barkers-regeneration-trilogy/dp/3848406403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454636030&sr=1-1&keywords=mona+radwan I could not believe a publisher would allow its name to be associated with such a shoddy product. Even the blurbs on the back cover are very badly worded and punctuated. The contents of the book are poorly formatted. There are terrible problems with the thesis itself, in punctuation, structure, citation, referencing, style and level of research, indicating either that Radwan submitted it before her thesis was examined or before receiving comments from supervisors, because so much is wrong with this as a doctoral thesis. I am making this comment to warn everyone away from anything that comes out of this dreadful shambles of a publishing house. Avoid it like the plague. I have been burned. Save yourself.
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9I don't see your one star review when I follow the Amazon link, just a five star non review.– J WCommented Apr 22, 2016 at 13:09
Although it may seem harmless at first, there is one thing that is very important to bear in mind when you intend to publish your work: You do NOT want your name nor work associated with any dubious publishers, editors, conferences, journals, etc, as it may be harmful, e.g. you may end up having your high-quality work published amongst several low-quality ones.
Therefore, in my opinion, you should not risk Lambert, as they do not have any peer reviewing nor seem to enforce any quality standards.
Publish them online for maximum impact or try a genuine academic publisher for prestige. Lambert will basically offer to print out individual copies of your thesis for a very high price (thus making a lot of money). Plus they use fake accounts in social media among other shady practices:
http://journalology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/lambert-academic-publishing-or-how-not.html
