In the article I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm, Joseph Stromberg shares his experience of how his undergraduate thesis was turned into a printed copy. He confessed that his initial purpose for selling the thesis was to get the “sheer pleasure of documenting and sharing the experience”. Unfortunately, for Stromberg, his experience with Lambert Academic Publishing did not turn out to be a delightful glance into the academic publishing landscape.
Driven by curiosity, Stromberg then found out about certain publishing houses who are using some “unethical and deceitful” means of publishing free content obtained from the Internet, transforming theses into books with no selection process, no editing, and essentially no proofreading, and even “selling the books back to their authors after they’ve already signed away the rights”.
Stromberg ends the article with a humorous anecdote of how he inserted an irrelevant sentence into his published book, but I finish the article with my heart heavy. More than one year ago, I embarked on an endeavour of publishing undergraduate essays in digital form, and I was lucky enough to receive full support from the university. At some points, I was worried about being part of this Open Access journal entrepreneur, some of whose models have become the woe of many academics, but we never undertook such notorious strategy in exchange for profit. We are fortunate to have a competent editorial team who dedicatedly carry out the entire publishing process, and a publicity team who actively advocate the value of undergraduate publishing through launching partnership programme with several leading publishers. Of course, as a publishing business, profit is one of the priorities; call me idealistic, but we as publishers shall never forget our initial aspiration of spreading knowledge, not to mention that we must run the business legally and ethically.
Image Credit: Joseph Stromberg for Future Tense/slate.com
Publishing Insights 
Reblogged this on Just A Little Nutmeg.
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Yes I too have been approached via email inviting me to self publish, but being wary, have not responded to them – it is easy to be fooled though!
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Indeed, and I’m very curious about how they obtained my email address……
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They hire computer ‘geeks’ who would find email addresses quite easily I suggest!
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This is an interesting post. 🙂 Have you heard about folks who blatantly plagiarize directly from Wikipedia – reams of text (originally the hard work of online contributors) and sell books as bound copies on eBay or Amazon? When I encountered these a couple of years ago, I was simply aghast that folks would stoop to this level. Now, that said, I also wish to thank you for stopping by to read my recent post. 🙂
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I am incredibly ignorant on how to get anything published- although I’ve wanted to get my undergraduate thesis published for some time. Thanks for breaking the ice for me! Hopefully I can start the journey to publication soon.
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Hi Jess,
I’m glad you find it helpful! And good luck with getting your UG thesis published 🙂
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Thank you SO very much for posting this. I was very fortunate to know of online resources that categorize and designate suspicious and fraudulent publishers.
I had my undergraduate thesis published in a peer-reviewed journal. I also have a book review published by the same one. Granted, the process took a year, but getting acquainted was a valuable experience. I myself wasn’t so knowledgable of credible journals. I did a Google search of academic journals related to my topic, and in terms of reputation, it helped to look at universities that listed the journals on their research department pages (often under “Call for Papers”), and after looking through the CVs of several academics in the field of my thesis, I decided on a journal to submit my work to.
You have to a lot of searching and even asking around. It is quite a noble project though, to have a database just for suspicious journals and publishers, either traditional or open access.
Thank you.
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Hi there, thanks for sharing your experience! I also have some experience with getting my thesis published, and for me it also took almost a year to complete the entire process. I completely agree with you that it really matters to put a lot of work into searching for the right journal to submit to. Also, even in academic publishing (or particularly in academic publishing?) it’s never just about getting your paper published — if it’s published on a journal with bad reputation, it can definitely leave some spots your CV……
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Beware of a greedy publisher. They might use your work for their benefit, and you ended up with nothing.
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