Edwin Mellen Press

Edwin Mellen Press

Founded	1972
Founder	Herbert Richardson
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	Lewiston, New York
Publication types	Books
Official website	www.mellenpress.com

The Edwin Mellen Press is a scholarly publishing house with offices in Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales. It was founded in 1972 by religious scholar Herbert Richardson.^[1] It describes itself as "a non-subsidy academic publisher of books in the humanities and social sciences" and publishes "monographs, critical editions, collections, translations, revisionist studies, constructive essays, bibliographies, dictionaries, reference guides and dissertations."^[2]

History

Herbert Richardson founded the Edwin Mellen Press in 1972 with the goal of publishing dissertations by graduate students from his department at the University of St. Michael's College, a Roman Catholic institution that is part of the University of Toronto. Richardson originally ran the press from the basement of his home, which he shared with his wife and four children. The business was named after Edwin Mellen, Richardson's grandfather who was a lover of books and died of a heart attack at 58.^[3] Richardson's great-grandfather was Isaac Adams, a Massachusetts State Senator and the inventor of the Adams Power Press.^[4]

The Press soon expanded and began to publish dissertations by scholars outside the University of Toronto. By 1977,The Press had grown large enough to warrant its own space. The Edwin Mellen Press briefly established an office in Fredericksburg, VA, before ultimately relocating to Lewiston, NY, a village just across the Canada–US border near Niagara Falls, in 1979.^[5]The Press continued to grow and was soon publishing as many as 150 titles a year. In 1987, the Edwin Mellen Press founded an office in Lampeter, Wales.

Scholarly Publishing

The Edwin Mellen Press publishes books written at the doctoral reading level, and founder Herbert Richardson has written that The Press "values scholar-for-scholar research more than anything." While university presses often look for works that will appeal to thousands of readers, The Press is primarily interested in whether a work will contribute to the scholarship surrounding a wide range of subjects. In fact, The Press states that "the sole criterion for publication is that the manuscript must make a contribution to scholarship." ^[6]

This has led to The Press often publishing very detailed research that would otherwise be rejected by larger university presses. The Press has published books on topics as varied as the health problems of migrants living on the border of Thailand and Burma to the role of parrots in fiction.

Edwin Mellen books are included in research library collections all over the world, including the University of London, which has 4,926 of its books, and Harvard, which has 4,731.^[3]

Legal Controversies

Since 1993, the Press has attracted publicity for taking legal action against critics, which has generated significant controversy, particularly in the academic world.^[7]

• In 1993, The Press brought a libel suit against the magazine Lingua Franca, which it lost.^[7]
• In 2012, it brought a similar suit for $3.5 million in damages against McMaster University and one of its librarians, Dale Askey, over a blog posting made in 2010, before the man started working for the university.^[8] The Canadian Association of University Teachers and others criticized the suit as an attempt to use legal action to silence criticism; they believe that publication of criticism is a legitimate exercise of academic freedom.^[9][10] Martha Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa, initiated a petition demanding The Press drop its lawsuits; it garnered more than 3,100 names as of March 4, 2013. On that date, The Press announced that it had discontinued the court case against McMaster and Askey,^[11] but it continued a lawsuit against Askey personally.^[12] On February 5, 2015, Askey stated that The Press had settled its second lawsuit against him.^[13]
• On March 21, 2013, The Press threatened legal action against The Society for Scholarly Publishing for hosting allegedly libelous blog posts and comments on The Scholarly Kitchen.^[14] The Scholarly Kitchen removed the content in question from its website on March 29, 2013. It restored the blog post, though not the specific comment alleged to be libellous, a few days later, and published a blog post explaining its actions.^[15][16]
• In April 2013, The Press threatened to take legal action against the interim library dean of the University of Utah, over blog posts he wrote criticizing The Press for its legal action against Askey.^[17] The matter was settled, without payment, in February 2015.^[18]

Sociologist Kenneth Westhues studied aspects of this litigation in his book The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High Achieving Professors (2006), a work published by the Edwin Mellen Press.^[19]

Selected Published works

• Cameron, Averil; Puttick, Elizabeth; Clarke, Bernard (1993), Desert Mothers: Women Ascetics in Early Christian Egypt, Edwin Mellen Press 
• Current Issues on Theology and Religion in Latin America and Africa. Lewiston, N.Y. and Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen Press, 280 + xv pp., 2002.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. I: The First Period of the Pinochet Government 1973-1980. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, 302 pp. Winner of the Adele Mellen Prize 2004
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. II: The Archbishop Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 364 pp. 2006.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. III: The Second Period of the Pinochet Government 1980-1990. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.
• Morley, Ian (2008). British provincial civic design and the building of late-Victorian and Edwardian cities, 1880-1914. Edwin Mellen Press. 
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. IV: Torture and Forced Disappearance 1973-1974. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. V: Torture and Forced Disappearance 1974-1976. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. VI: The Allende Government 1970-1973. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. VII: Christians for Socialism and the MIR. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. VIII: The Visit of John Paul II (1987). Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012.
• A History of the Lamas in Tibet 1391-2006. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012.
• Church, Liberation and World Religions. London: T&T Clark, 2012.
• A Social History of the Catholic Church in Chile Vol. IX: St. Alberto Hurtado and St. Teresa de Los Andes. Lewinston, New York, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013.

See also

• Herbert Richardson

References

External links

• Official website
• Murray Miles, "The Responsibility Of Professors: Academic Freedom, Peer Review, And The Scholarly Conscience Today"(1995) Note: This article has been removed, but is still available in the Wayback Machine
• "Publishing Ethics and Platform Neutrality - Peer to Peer Review", Library Journal',' 12 March 2013