Is iConcept Press a Vanity Press?

I received an email from iConcept Press this morning:

Based on your paper: Test-first Java concurrency for the classroom (2010), we would like to invite you to submit a chapter to our book project under the working title: Java in Academic and Research. The editor of this book is [redacted].

We are especially interested in the motivation of your problem and why you model your problem in such way. We would like you to expand the paper and contribute to our book. Please note that we are not asking to republish the mentioned paper.

All our books are published as hard copy with ISBN and as open access. Each corresponding author will receive one copy of the book free of charge. The publishing fee (for each paper) is USD$38/page for the first 16 pages and USD$18/page thereafter. Each chapter normally has 16 – 25 pages.

About $600 for a book chapter, that sounds like a vanity press to me. iConcept Press claims to do peer review, but I don’t exactly trust that claim:

Is it that I simply pay money and my article can be printed in your book?

No. We go through several review processes. If your article is not up to our standards or is not what we require, we will not publish your article, even if you pay us.

Who are the reviewers? Who are the other authors who contribute? The editor of the book was given, but he seems to be rather unknown. The books that have been published by iConcept Press don’t seem to be complete garbage, judging by a quick glance at bioinformatics material, for example, from an outsider’s perspective, but I’m in no position to really make that determination.

I think if it weren’t for the publishing fee, I might roll with it. But I’m not going to spend $600 to have something published that might end up being a diamond in a turd.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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10 Responses to Is iConcept Press a Vanity Press?

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