Vanity publishers: How to identify and avoid them

Shrestha, Jiban Vanity publishers: How to identify and avoid them., 2021 [Preprint]

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Vanity publishers are companies that charge authors to publish their theses/books, either directly or indirectly. They publish theses/books without going through peer review, editing and proofreading procedures. They don't care about the quality of the theses/books they publish. They leave the authors to do all of the formatting and spell-checking on their own. Vanity publishers are predatory publishers. They will actively recruit authors and publicize their publishing offerings. They frequently target early-career scholars who are looking for opportunities to publish their works or may offer to publish their thesis. They contact master's, bachelor's, and doctorate program graduates and offer to publish their theses for free. These publishers offer publication of an author’s work in a book form for free. Vanity publishers do not offer professional marketing services. They use print-on-demand to distribute these/books at premium costs. They advise the author to self-publish through a partner press instead. They do not distribute royalty to authors as they promised. A vanity publisher may not be a member of a recognized association/group as given below; • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) • STM Association • Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) • Book Industry Study Group • Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association • Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) • Publishers Association Vanity publishing harms or degrades academic reputations and makes wastage of time, money, resources, and efforts. Vanity publications are worthless. The authors lose copyright to their works. The published theses/books are of poor quality which do not meet the requirement for an academic or employment career. Universities and research organizations should educate scholars and researchers, especially juniors, about the existence of vanity publishers. Vanity publications must be avoided while evaluating CV or bio-data of researchers for job promotion and releasing the research grants. The students, academics, and researchers should be careful to avoid vanity publications and their citations.

Item type:	Preprint
Keywords:	Authors, Publications, vanity publishers
Subjects:	E. Publishing and legal issues. > EB. Printing, electronic publishing, broadcasting.
Depositing user:	Mr. Jiban Shrestha
Date deposited:	04 May 2022 17:31
Last modified:	04 May 2022 17:31
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/10760/42635