OmniScriptum Publishing Group

The group's first publishing house was founded in Düsseldorf in 2002 by Wolfgang Philipp Müller and relocated 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.

Omniscriptum specializes in German, Russian, Spanish, French, and English dissertations, theses, and research projects. Its business model involves a team of acquisitions editors who search the internet for academic authors and invite them to submit their manuscripts. The editorial team sends emails to people who have written a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation and whose college library has a web-accessible catalog.

In April 2010, Omniscriptum founded an imprint devoted to religion, spirituality, and Christian theology: Fromm Verlag. In October 2010 Dictus Publishing was launched to publish political texts related to the European Union.

Business practices

Omniscriptum's business practices have been questioned for profiting from the sale of unacclaimed works. In November 2009, an article in the newspaper Berner Zeitung faulted Omniscriptum for not disclosing that the books it was publishing were academic dissertations and for charging high prices. American writer Victoria 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 (a blog about plagiarism and scientific misconduct), referred to OMS as a spam publisher.