Omniscriptum Publishing Group, formerly known as VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, is a Germanpublishing group headquartered in Riga, Latvia. Founded in 2002 in Düsseldorf, its book production is based on print-to-order technology. The company publishes theses, research notes, and dissertations through its e-commerce bookstores. Its publishing methods have been questioned for the soliciting of manuscripts from individuals, and for providing authors with the appearance of a peer-reviewed publishing history. OmniScriptum is designated as non-academic by the Norwegian Scientific Index, and its subsidiary Lambert Academic Publishing has been described as a predatoryvanity press which does "not apply the basic standards of academic publishing such as peer-review, editorial or proof-reading processes." The company also offers print-to order publishing for fiction authors. It previously specialized in publishing and selling Wikipedia articles, but has stated that the practice of publishing Wikipedia content ended in 2013.
History
The first publishing house of the group was founded in Düsseldorf in 2002 by Wolfgang Philipp Müller, and transferred to Saarbrücken in August 2005. The Mauritian office was established in April 2007 and was managed from 2008 up until May 2011 by David Benoit Novel, followed by Reezwan Ghanty. In 2007 the group began distributing its publications through Lightning Source, Amazon, and the German company Books on Demand.
Various branches of the company, including Alphascript Publishing, Betascript Publishing, Fastbook Publishing, and Doyen Verlag, have published books consisting of compilations of Wikipedia articles. These books have been purchased by some German and Flemish libraries. The titles were published as edited by Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome, and John McBrewster who are also listed as authors. 180,818 titles were listed on the OMS bookshop. Betascript lists, Miriam T. Timpledon, Susan F. Marseken, Mariam T. Tennoe, and Susan F. Henssonow as editors, giving an additional 356,765 titles. Regarding its publishing strategies, Alphascript asserted that: "There is hardly another platform for quick and better processing of information than Wikipedia" for customers "who want to be informed on a specific subject" in book form, though they can "have online everything free of charge". Omniscriptum has edited 22,000 works. According to the company, the last compilation of Wikipedia articles was published in 2013. The company has stated that it stopped the practice of publishing Wikipedia content in order to focus on "original academic special interest authors."
Business practices
Omniscriptum's business practices have been questioned for profiting by the sale of unacclaimed works and for insufficiently disclosing that content is available elsewhere. In November 2009 an article in the Swiss newspaperBerner Zeitung described Omniscriptum's practices as questionable. The paper faulted Omniscriptum for not disclosing that the books it was publishing were academic dissertations, for publishing works that received a passing grade, and for charging high prices. American writerVictoria Strauss characterized OMS as "an academic author mill", while Pagan Kennedy notes that OMS's practices are comparable to a form of kudzu weed proliferation in book publishing. In January 2011 German professor Debora Weber-Wulff, in Copy, Shake, and Paste, referred to OMS as a spam publisher, which has been further confirmed in a blog post at Guide2Research.
