Is This The Case With LAP (Lambert Academic Publishing)?
One of my friends, SS, got this email from LAP stating that they were interested to publish his work on passengers' consumer behavior. SS is a well-respected employee and a keen researcher. To have a publisher trying to publish his work was something highly believable. So, when he asked me to help him with some further editing of our work and to follow-up on the offer, I just leaped and started to work without any second thought. I foolishly did not check their credibility at all (and I cursed myself so many times because of it). I cursed myself even more when I realized that I almost shoved down my partners, SS, Titi, and Yuda into a chasm while there were plenty of information available on how to avoid it (even their acquisition editor's English was not really good. I had plenty of rejections letters from editors and their English were superb).If you google LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, you will get like a gazillion information on how "fishy" it was. The internet (blogs and official university websites) was filled with information about this publisher. I do not want to call them a fraud because they asked for people's works legally, they did intent to publish your work, they did not ask any money from the authors, and they promised a fee. However, somehow I feel like publishing with LAP will not benefit me (us) in any significant way because they offered no support on editing and reviewing and it was a very serious shortcoming since we are not English native speakers, we do not have many experiences about publishing a book (even experienced writers still use editors), and it will be a fatal flaw for a scientific book to be published without respectable reviews (actually, it was ridiculous).
If you have a really good material, but not good enough to be screened by big publisher, then go to a small one. A respectable small (perhaps regional or national) publisher. Being published by small publishing house is one thing, but being associated with a bad one is a totally different matter. It will be better also if you can trim your work here and there and submit it to a respectable academic journal. However, if your material is average at best and your English is not too good (like me), then you should avoid LAP too because they did not seem to give significant support in editing and reviewing. You do not want to end up as an awful author in amazon.com with people stating your work as "horrible". I do not want to be remembered as an author with "at least five grammatical and lexical errors in every page". I actually feel sorry for LAP authors that unintentionally got bad publicity in amazon.com. They actually have pretty good material, but lack of supports on editing and reviewing. It was like suicide.
Bellow are some links about LAP:
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/performance/herdc/criteria
Cheers,
Dya
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