Beware the author mills…

Dear All

I thought I’d write this fairly urgently as many of you may have been in the same position, or are likely to be in the near future…

This morning I arrived to find an email in my work inbox from Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP), an arm of VDM. They are offering to publish my PhD thesis; in fact, here’s the email in full:

“Dear Paul Smith ,

 According to the University of Manchester ‘s electronic library, you submitted a paper entitled “Academic Literacy Practices: plausibility in the essays of a diverse social science cohort ” in the course of your postgraduate degree.

Since we are planning publications in this subject area, our editorial team would be glad to know whether you would be keen on publishing the above mentioned work with us.

 LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing is a member of an international group having nearly 10 years of experience in the publication of high-quality research works from well-known institutions worldwide.

 For your information, all our books are available in printed form and marketed across the globe through more than 80,000 booksellers worldwide.

 Kindly let know if you would be interested in receiving more detailed information in this respect.

 I am looking forward to hearing from you.

 Sincerely,”

I’ve come across sharp practice in publishing before, having nearly gone all the way in submitting a joint paper to Nova Publishing. A quick internet search confirmed my suspicions. I am not going to go into any detail here, but if you are unaware of what the problem is with these people can I suggest you go a quick Google search and read just a few of the results. (I should specify that I am aiming this post at current PGRs and recent PGR graduates.) Essentially these publishers aim at a high output of material, with unfavourable conditions and low publishing standards, aiming at current students or young scholars who are desperate to be published.

I am going to avoid this like the plague and this seems like a very good forum to suggest that you do likewise. It occurred to me that while I am writing this, it might be productive to outline my plan for getting published as it currently stands, in the hope of getting advice or comments on this, and/or inspiring you to do the same. Because, without a plan…and I think you know the rest.

First of all: I can already claim a short list of publications, but at present, they are all joint-authored. What I really want is to get some single-authored publications out there. I’m not sure my PhD thesis would stand as a monograph in anything like its current form; possibly with some major rejigging and some new material, but I can’t visualise it just yet. Instead, I have fairly well-developed plans for three discrete papers, all based on different chapters or lines of argument within the PhD. Ideally, I would be looking at good journals, but there are other considerations to bear in mind as well. Most prominently, I have submitted a proposal for a chapter to an international edited collection. I will hear next month whether this proposal is successful; if it is, then obviously I will have a deal of work to do on recasting the chapter in slightly longer form. But then I will be able to claim Smith (forthcoming, 2014) or something to that effect, which will be useful seeing as I am looking into grant proposals with Alex Baratta in SoE, on the same subject. To be able to back up the grant proposal with one’s own publications I see as no small thing. So even if journal papers outrank collected papers, this has a number of ancillary functions.

Elsewhere, I was expecting a conference that I helped to organise last year to yield another edited collection. This hasn’t happened yet, but I can easily see a way in which it could. I think I could produce a provocative paper that might get other people writing; if I could produce a draft and a draft proposal for the collection, that paper might find a natural home there (and be a quick win at the same time).

Everything else that has no such tie-ins will be aimed at journals. I already have a few in mind; my favourite being Studies in Higher Education. I remember Julian Williams saying to us some years ago: if you could subscribe to one journal, what would it be? This has changed over the years, but I find that my reading and reference always comes back to a hard core of 6 or 8 journal titles; and in my view it’s in those journals that one should seek to publish.

One last thing that has occurred to me is how certain academic figures are extremely skilled in recasting the same material into many different forms for different purposes. The first thing I do, then, when I get some of this stuff published, will be to say: where can I publish something similar? Another thing that occurs is the links that can be made across projects; but I’m a bit early in that process to give any concrete examples.

To end with: one thing that’s apparent from the interweb is the lack of support that a lot of graduate researchers think they are getting in terms of advice on how to publish. As you can see from the above, there are a lot of complications, and not all of those are caused by unprincipled people out to profit from the uninitiated. It would be interesting to read others’ plans for publication; but also what sources of advice people can suggest.