Ken, you make valid points. However, I understand Farooq to be arguing not against self-publishing or print-on-demand (POD) publishing per se. I understand him, rather, to be be critiquing:
1. The growing trend IN NIGERIA to pass off vanity publishing as an academic accomplishment and to proceed to fraudulently ascend the academic ladder on the basis of that. His argument here is not that these publications may not have some insights but that they violate the ethos of peer review, quality control, and editorial oversight, long established as valuational mechanisms in the academy.
2. The fact that these POD and self-published books and journals, whatever their insight, do not circulate beyond the author/editor and their family and friends. As a result, their insights are lost to the academic and intellectual community.
3. That because there is little or no editorial intervention in the work the quality is often poor, and even when one is able to access the book or journal it is a turn off. If you cannot read a text because it is riddled with grammatical, structural, and stylistic problems how can you get to its insights, if any?
I recognize that things are changing, but I would hate to see that change occur at the expense of long established protocols for disseminating ideas in a readable, edifying form. I have my issues with academic review, which is by no means a perfect arbiter of quality, but we can discuss that another day.
Sent from my iPad
sounds like what we have called "Self-Publishing" presses. this is not necessarily a fraudulent thing, unless its claims are misleading. but self-publishing presses have been around forever, and as you say, farooq, the books are not vetted, so do not "count" towards a publication in any real sense. on the other hand, if your manuscript has not succeeded in getting a publisher, you can go ahead and do it, and then send copies for reviews to journals. if the text gets a favorable review, you can build on that.
i don't think this is bad at all, unless it is duplicitous. as long as everyone realizes it is a self-published text, it can enter into the public domain and possibly gain an audience.
fiction authors have done this in the past; and "publishing" with electronic sources has made this even easier--which is a good thing, i believe. for instance, africultures is able to produce an enormous amount of great stuff, without the long process of vetting print journals go through, which can delay publication by up to two years. africultures is not self-publishing, but it is also not following the rigorous processes of print journals in its vetting.
sort of like blogs, or even comments in major newspapers that follow editorials or articles. often the comments, another form of self-publishing, are much better than the piece on which they comment.
things are changing....
ken
On 5/27/12 1:02 AM, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:Saturday, May 26, 2012
Print-on-demand Book Scams and Nigerian Universities
By Farooq A. Kperogi
The other day, a friend of mine on Facebook proudly announced that his master's thesis had been published into a book by a German publishing company called Lambert Academic Publishing. Several people congratulated him. But I didn't. I knew he had been scammed—and that he would in turn unwittingly scam the Nigerian university system where he works as a lecturer.
Since reading his self-congratulatory post, I have heard of scores of other Nigerian university teachers who have published "academic books" through Lambert and other such Euro-American publishing companies. Before this trend becomes an epidemic, I thought I should call attention to an emerging, borderline fraudulent publishing model called "print on demand."
This is the way the model works. Author mills (that is, deceptive publishing houses that publish ANY work submitted to them) based in Europe and America use software to crawl the Internet (sometimes real people do the Web prowling) for any mention of "thesis" or "dissertation" on the Internet. The web crawler will identify the email addresses associated with the authors of the theses or dissertations and then send them an email using a standard email template that goes something like this:
"I am writing on behalf of an international publishing house, Lambert Academic Publishing.In the course of a research on the … I came across a reference to your thesis on "...". We are an international publisher whose aim is to make academic research available to a wider audience.LAP would be especially interested in publishing your dissertation in the form of a printed book.Your reply including an e-mail address to which I can send an e-mail with further information in an attachment will be greatly appreciated. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,Acquisition EditorLAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing AG & Co. KGSaarbrückenDudweiler Landstraße 99, 66123 Saarbrücken Germany."I have received many variations of this email template at least five times in the past few years. If a person agrees to publish his/her dissertation or thesis with the company, the company will request that the manuscript be sent to them via email. Within six weeks, the book will be "out." Of course, it will neither be peer-reviewed by experts in the field nor will it be proofread by a copy editor. So it comes out embarrassingly error-ridden. It's basically garbage in, garbage out. As an American who submitted his manuscript to Lambert put it in a blog post, "it is very evident that no one at the publication house bothered to do any editing. There are multiple grammatical errors."
In reality, the publishing house merely prepares a camera-ready copy of the manuscript, prints and mails a free author's copy of the book, and waits for orders. The company makes money when the author's friends and relations place an order for the book--or when the author purchases extra copies of the book to share with friends and family. Since they print only when an order is placed (thus the name "print on demand"), they lose nothing. I am told that authors from the Third World are required to pay for their author's copy.
The front- and back-page prototype of the book will be displayed on the publishing company's website and on Amazon.com—and that's it. You will never find the book in any bookstore or library. There is no media publicity for the book by the publisher, no advertising, no marketing, no distribution, and no critical reviews in academic or popular journals.
The author is promised royalties if the book sells a certain number of copies. Of course, no print-on-demand book sells enough copies for the author to earn any royalties.
Here is why Nigerian university administrators should be concerned about print-on-demand books. One, they do not go through any kind of review before they are published. In fact, many people have experimented with sending a farrago of mumbo jumbo to these publishing companies to see if they will be published. And, sure enough, they often get published. No manuscript sent to print-on-demand publishers is ever returned as unpublishable, however awfully it may have been written. As most people know, only peer-reviewed books can count toward promotion in academia.
Two, they have limited or no materiality. By this I mean that there are usually no more than a few copies of the "books" in circulation. That means they add nothing to the disciplinary conversations of their areas since they can't be found in libraries and bookstores. In other words, they are basically worthless.
Third, our people have been brainwashed into thinking that anything published in the West must be of high quality. People may innocently think Lambert is a legitimate academic press because it has a German address. Before you know it, many people will be promoted to professors based purely on fraudulent books they publish with the company, which American writer Victoria Strauss aptly called "an academic author mill". That would be unfair to people who struggle against all odds to produce high-quality scholarship.
Many countries are waking up to the academic fraud that print-on-demand books are. The Australian Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC), for instance, has blacklisted books published by Lambert Academic Publishing. The Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) has a responsibility to do the same.
Related Articles:Ndi Okereke's Fake Doctorate and Professorship
On Bauchi's Fake Lecturer--and What Should Be Done
Intellectual 419: Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo Compared
Andy Uba and the Epidemic of Fakery in Nigeria
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/farooqkperogiTwitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farooqkperogi
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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