Newly minted University of Pittsburgh Master’s and Doctorate holders may receive an e-mail from Lambert Academic Publishing, offering to publish your thesis or dissertation as a book. While this sounds flattering, there is no real advantage to taking up the offer.
Googling Lambert Academic Publishing will bring up a number of websites describing Lambert’s business model, which does not provide the author wider distribution of the work, royalties, or enhancement of their CV. If you sign with Lambert, you relinquish all rights to future publication, for all or parts of your thesis. Publishers generally require authors to sign copyright agreements, which vary in what rights the author retains of further use. In this and all other cases, be sure you are satisfied that the advantages of publishing, such as visibility and recognition for your work, outweigh any loss of control over the content.
If you publish with Lambert, your thesis will be published without editing and with virtually no format change from the final version approved by the University. You will be encouraged to buy a number of copies yourself in order to lower the price of the book for other buyers.
If you are considering publishing articles based on your thesis or dissertation work, see the HSLS Scholarly Communication Guide for information on selecting a publisher, open access publication, your rights as an author, and more.
~Barb Folb