{"id":183,"date":"2009-09-29T16:07:08","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T04:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/?p=183"},"modified":"2012-08-17T16:27:08","modified_gmt":"2012-08-17T04:27:08","slug":"we-want-to-publish-your-thesis-a-warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/2009\/09\/29\/we-want-to-publish-your-thesis-a-warning\/","title":{"rendered":"We want to publish your thesis – A Warning"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have heard of a\u00a0diploma mill<\/a>\u00a0but until yesterday I didn’t know what an\u00a0author mill<\/a>\u00a0was although they have been impacting on us for the past few months. What generally happens is that a student with a PhD or Masters thesis receives an email from a publisher offering to publish their thesis in print format. Typically they are told that their work has come to the company’s attention and that “I am therefore wondering if you would be interested in cooperating with us towards a worldwide marketed publication of your work.”<\/p>\n

Coming out of the blue this sounds quite appealing but, like many exciting prospects, it probably is too good to be true. The companies that make these offers practice “publish on demand” which means that no copies are printed until someone orders one. Until then there is only a brief record of the thesis on various websites – no other marketing is done and the author mills make their money out of the sheer volume of theses they are able to present. Only a few copies of each one (or most probably none) ever get sold and the cost per copy is set quite high. Often these few sales are to the author’s family and friends who are falsely impressed at the prospect of seeing the work in print.<\/p>\n

In the meantime the author may have signed over the copyright to their work which means that they cannot take it to a bona fide publisher. And having work published by one of these outfits is not a good look. A really good way of getting your thesis into the public domain is through depositing a copy in\u00a0Massey Research Online<\/a>\u00a0(MRO) – this is easy to do and gets your work onto the Internet where it is much more likely to attract attention than having expensive print copies available in a handful of libraries. One Masters thesis in MRO has been downloaded over a thousand times since the beginning of 2008!\u00a0Read more about Massey Research Online here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you have received an unsolicited publishing offer and would like some advice please feel free to\u00a0contact us<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0libcol@massey.ac.nz<\/a><\/p>\n

Bruce White
\nCollege Liaison<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have heard of a\u00a0diploma mill\u00a0but until yesterday I didn’t know what an\u00a0author mill\u00a0was although they have been impacting on us for the past few months. What generally happens is that a student with a PhD or Masters thesis receives an email from a publisher offering to publish their thesis in print format. Typically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[255,59,28],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-massey-research-online","tag-publishing","tag-theses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}