Watch out for Edwin Mellen press

Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University, is being sued for libel by Edwin Mellen Press for posting negative comments about the press's books in a blog post. As a university librarian, his job is to evaluate books and publishers and advise his university. This is scary stuff: a commercial publisher is trying to shut down academic freedom. Perhaps scarier still is the fact that Askey's university has yet to come to his defense. If suing bloggers for negative remarks were to become common, many of us would be in big trouble.

You can read about this case in Sam Trosow's blog, which has links to the lawsuit (that document includes the blog post in question), and a piece by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Education.

You can sign a petition in support of Dale Askey at Change.org. I've signed.

Mellen does publish a few archaeology books, titles that I had not heard of. My bibliography database includes some of their books in the field of urban history. I've looked at several of these, but I don't think I've ever cited one.

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