What is vanity press?
Vanity press is a type of publishing, where authors pay to have their work published; either in money or – more often – in the author’s publication rights. During the publication process, no peer-review is promised by the publisher and no quality control is done. Vanity press usually does no editing, and the authors are left to do all the formatting and spell-checking by themselves. Their works are then published in self-publishing outlets, such as on Amazon, and physical copies of their books have outrageously high prices. The authors, of course, get no income from the sales.
Vanity press usually targets young academics with no experience, that have just finished their degree and produced a thesis. Then, such publisher offers publication of their work in a book form for free. If however, the author wants to publish their research in the form of an academic paper afterwards, they are usually not permitted to do so, because of the legal contract with the vanity publisher.
Difference between vanity press and predatory publishing
Predatory publishers claim to have a working peer review, but actually it’s either not present or it’s substantially flawed. Vanity press, on the other hand, never claim to have a peer review process – therefore they are usually perfectly legal businesses.
List of vanity press
Here we list the known vanity press outlets. Please be cautious about sending them any of your articles or theses.
- Apple Academic Press
- Cognella (not precisely a vanity press, but with a similar impact)
- Editorial Académica Española (see OMNIScriptum)
- Edwin Mellen Press
- Eliva Press
- EU Researcher
- Harding House Publishing
- IGI Global (Idea Group Publishing) (note: this publisher is a member of COPE, which should mean they adhere to their ethical standards; please read this, this and this, and decide by yourself)
- Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP, see OMNIScriptum)
- Nova Science Publishers
- OMNIScriptum Publishing Group (includes all of their “academic brands”)
- Research Outreach (vanity PR magazine for academics)
- Scholars’ Press (see OMNIScriptum)
- VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (see OMNIScriptum)
- Vestal Creative Services
Updated on December 8, 2021