Newsletter

April 2013

Call in the lawyers

Edwin Mellen Press is continuing to threaten its
online critics.

A second librarian is facing legal threats from
Mellen, ascholarly publishing house in Lewiston, N.Y. Mellen is threatening
legal action against Rick Anderson, the interim library dean at the University
of Utah, after Anderson criticized Mellen, in part for legal action the press
has already taken against another librarian.

Strong reaction late last week by academic librarians
suggests Mellen could face a backlash among the academics who make up the target
audience for the books Mellen sells.

In the first case, Mellen recently sued Dale Askey,
associate librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, over a blog post he wrote
in August 2010 that was highly critical of Mellen. The company dropped that
suit, but another in which Mellen’s founder is the plaintiff in a libel action
against Askey remains.

Now, Mellen is threatening Anderson for two blog
posts he wrote about the Askey case that were also critical of Mellen. The
publisher is also threatening a freelance copyeditor who left a comment on one
of Anderson’s posts.

In the short term, Mellen’sthreats prompted
the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s to remove Anderson’s posts and the
comment critical of Mellen from the society’s blog, The Scholarly Kitchen.

Mellen’s attorney, Amanda R. Amendola, said in a
letter to The Scholarly Kitchen that Anderson had "written disparaging comments
about our publishing program, the quality of our books and has attacked the
character of our editor, Professor Herbert Richardson." She said the intent of
her letter was to put the blog “on notice” about Anderson’s writing.

In a February 11 post, which
remains online at a site that regularly archives large swaths of the Internet, Anderson
called Mellen’s books “generally overpriced and of poor quality” and gave his
account of a conversation with Richardson, which he called the “strangest phone
conversation I’ve ever had with a publisher.”

In a March 5 post, which
also remains archived online, Anderson continued to question some of
the company’s dealings.

Faced with legal action, Anderson said Friday he
thinks Mellen’s behavior now speaks for itself.

“It’s an important part of a professional librarian’s
work to evaluate the offerings of publishers and I think the letter from Edwin
Mellen Press’s attorney speaks eloquently for itself,” Anderson said.

In a second letter to The Scholarly Kitchen, Amendola threatens
specific legal action against a freelance copy editor, Kristine Hunt. In a
comment left on one of Anderson’s posts, Hunt saidMellen offered its authors
“no copy-editing, proofreading or layout services." Amendola said Hunt’s claim
was “simply untrue.”

Hunt declined Friday to comment on Mellen’s
letter. In the face of the letters from Mellen, The Scholarly Kitchen
decided to remove the posts. The blog’s editor in chief, Kent Anderson, said he
made the decision on the advice of legal counsel.

“We have had the posts up, the information wasn’t
necessarily that novel and we felt that the trade off between taking them down
and posting the letters was fair,” Anderson, who is not related to Rick
Anderson, said.

The British Columbia Library Association also
discovered what it called “possibly
bizarre”activity. According to website domain name registration
records, someone claiming to use aMellenemail addressregistered at least two
Dale Askey-related domain names,
daleaskey.com and daleaskey.net. Mellen did not return a call seeking comment.

Askey said he did not register the domains himself
and would be troubled if Mellen is, in fact, swooping up domains with his name.

“If there is any truth to those allegations, I would
be very disturbed,” Askey said. “I think registering someone’s name as a domain
is a very creepy thing to do. You can’t mean well by it. There’s no good intent
to it.”

Mellen is no stranger to criticism or litigating its
critics. The company sued the now-defunct Lingua Franca over a 1993
article that called Mellen a “quasi-vanity press cunningly disguised as an
academic publishing house.”

The article said Mellen had capitalized on a
pre-approval system universities use to automatically buy some publishers’
books.Mellenlostthe
suit.

Now, librarians are suggesting Mellen’s legal
maneuvers may hurt the company because university librarians will be on the
lookout for Mellen books and give them closer scrutiny.

Askey said he is in disbelief over Mellen’s latest
action.

“When you’re not really making friends in the business, why you would want to dig a deeper hole escapes me,” he said.

Kent Anderson said it didn’t make sense to him for
any company to argue with its customers.

“I think every customer of anything, if you didn’t
like it and you told somebody and you get sued for saying that – that’s a bad
thing in general,” he said.