Lambert Academic Publishing – is it a real academic publishing?

/ Jin

Recently I received emails from Lambert Academic Publishing OmniScriptum GmbH & Co. KG.  I was surprised and happy that they came across a conference papers I wrote early this year. They were interested in my original work and publishing it to a book. Although it’s originally a working project report with me as a solo author, I knew I need to get agreement from the department first. With the agreement, I sent the report to the publisher as I’m also pleased to let people view my work and comment on it.

However, some thoughts I didn’t know why but occurred were warning me be careful. Within a week, my own instinct blows my overheated mind away.

  • There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Why my paper? why me?
  • They responded my emails quickly. By my experience, journal article reviewers will have at least two weeks to review an article. How can they read my whole report in three days without any comment and modifications required, and agree to publish it if I wish?
  • I accidentally delayed to register in their system. They then sent me another email to chase up.
  • Is it proper to publish my working report to a book?  I may need to get advice from professionals in this area.
  • I read their T&C carefully and found it sounds very easy to publish my own book and sale it on Amazon.  It seems all proofreading and quality checking are upon to the author his/herself.
  • My concerns were will people really buy the report if they knew they can get an e-copy from me directly. How many people will buy a report about popular technologies, especially we all know technology changes so fast.
  • I’m confident that my report is useful and good enough to distribute. However, what do I want from this publication? An academic credit? If so, why not go for a more well-known publisher? From academic people’s point of view, how brilliant the book will be? If it’s not good enough, it will add bad credits to my career, will it? For me, having a bad published book is worse than not having a published book.
  • I qualified in Information and Knowledge Management, The ideas such as “intellectual property”, “copyright” and “free information” are always in my mind. I searched online and found a handful of useful blog entries and discussions about this publishing service. It’s confirmed me to some extent.

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