Librarians and Publishers Working Together: MLA InSight Summit 2

The second MLA InSight Summit was held in Chicago in September.  I am on the Insight committee, the group that is working to put on a good program and produce deliverables to both librarians and publishers.  I also was the moderator for the September summit. (Gabe Rios moderated the first one and Jerry Perry is going to moderate the third summit.)

The summits are intended to be a space where librarians and key figures in the publishing and vendor world work together to try understand users (researchers, clinicians, students, nurses, etc.).  It is not a place to talk about pricing, sales, or budget blaming. It is a place to discuss the issues of our users impacting all of us and how we can take steps to improve things.  Because let’s face it, if our users stop using us (either of us) we are out of business.  The librarians who attend are a diverse group of librarians who represent different perspectives and health sciences libraries.  The publishers who attend represent small and big STEM publishers and vendors.

I wanted to wait until Elizabeth Ketterman (Library Director of the William E. Laupus Health Sciences Library at East Carolina University) and Sean Pidgeon (Publishing Director for Science and Medicine and Oxford University Press)published their summary of the of second session.  Guest Post: MLA InSight – How to Buy Whisky is a very good post that describes some of the issues we discussed.

Ketterman and Pidgeon list the most prevalent concerns and challenges we (librarians and publishers) are facing and that were discussed and explored.

They were:

  1. Patrons do not understand the value of the services provided by the library. (and I would say by natural extension publishers)
  2. We (librarians and publishers) have a poor understanding of how our users find content and interact with one another online.
  3. We seem to be helpless targets for pirates.
  4. Predatory publishers are taking advantage of a shifting Open Access Landscape.
  5. It is challenging to conduct rigorous and reproducible research in the biomedical sciences.

No surprise, I have several thoughts on those 5 issues and I plan to write about those things at future date.  The main thing I want to convey with today’s post is that both librarians and publishers came together to work their way through some of these problems. Did we solve them all on that day back in September? No, but we all certainly learned a lot more about those things than before the summit.

For example, after hearing from several different users (researchers, doctors, physical therapists, etc.) we learned that many of them just don’t give a damn about all of the special unique customization features that publishers (and some libraries) provide to people who create accounts and login to their sites.  I was sitting at a table with a person from a major publisher who actually said to everyone at the table, “We have spent all this time, effort, and man power on customized and personalized features that we just rolled out. Now I am thinking we wasted a lot of time and should have been looking at ways to better direct people to the content without logging in.”

That kind of information along with the collaborative effort to work together on things impacting both of us made the summit worth attending.  This was just the second summit, there are more good things to come that we can learn from.

At the annual meeting I will be helping to moderate, the Innovation & Research Practice Immersion Session 4, “Disorienting Dilemmas: Transforming the Librarian’s Understanding of How Today’s Health Professionals Discover and Use Information Resources Outside the Library Setting,” by Jeff Williams and Martin Wood. Monday May 5, 2019 from 4:30-5:55pm. Jeff’s presentation at the second summit was so revealing that I highly encourage librarians and vendors at MLA to attend his and Martin’s presentation on Monday.

I am also looking forward to the 3rd Insight Summit.  I hope that we can take the knowledge and information from Summits 1 and 2 and continue to build upon them other and create change together.  That is why I feel it is important that we get as much representation from librarians AND publishers for the next summit.

Publishers who have sent somebody please talk to Dan Doody to get an understanding of what is involved.  Publishers who sent somebody but didn’t feel it was worth attending again, ask yourself this question, “Did I send the right person?” Most likely you didn’t. Those publishers who are forward thinking and sent the right people (those high enough up in the company who are leaders in change) seem to have gotten the most value out of the summit.  Those who sent the local sales rep really missed out, and didn’t see the value because the information and message didn’t to the change agent.

Librarians who would like to attend talk to previous attendees or Gabe, Jerry and myself. We can tell you what it was like. We aren’t looking for any specific librarian position (director, collection development, systems, etc.). We are looking for a diverse group that are engaged, making changes, and willing to take that information and disperse to the library community.

We have only just begun. I think of the Summit 1 as a small little snowball rolling down the mountain. My hope is that with each summit the snow ball grows producing an avalanche of change.

*Here are more articles about the previous InSight summits:

 

What is Real?

I have always been a scifi junkie even before I knew that was genre term. I can remember as a grade school kid checking out all of the books about ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. I remember being disappointed when I had read everything on those topics in my public library. As I got older I branched out into aliens and conspiracy theories.  When the X-Files came out it was like seeing my public library bookshelf had added new titles and gone on TV.

All of those books, movies and TV shows dealt with what was real and what was fake.  Is there really a Bigfoot or is somebody walking around with really big fake feet?  Are there really ghosts or is it a shadow, lens flare, or active imagination?  The question of what is real, is always at the forefront.  You have the absolute believers who I think if they saw me early in the morning yelling at my kids to get ready for school would think demonic possession (I’m scary in so many ways in the morning).  You have the complete skeptics who can’t explain and discount a mother that had a bad feeling about her son, who unknown to her at the time was in a car accident in another city.

The question of what is real and fake has gone mainstream.  As I mentioned in my previous post, Masters of Illusion, you have more questionable types of “organizations” producing journals and holding conferences.  As CTVNews reported, you have questionable companies buying up reputable scientific journals.  For example, OMICS recently purchased several respected Canadian medical journals.  This is a cause for concern because the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against OMICS, “alleging that the company is ‘deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications’ and falsely claiming that its journals follow rigorous peer-review protocols.”

We live in a Wag the Dog world.  Where technology and communication have made it difficult to tell the difference between real news/research and fabricated.  The mud slinging and fact twisting of previous Presidential elections seems so quaint compared to the outright fake news about both candidates that flooded people’s dashboards and “news streams.”  We have people questioning reputable news organizations and claiming they are either fake news agencies or report on fake news.

How does the Presidential election fake news mess impact problem of fake scientific research and publishing.  It doesn’t, but it illustrates how fake information can easily be taken for real and how real information can be then called fake by opposition.  Take the example vaccines causing autism. There is not one reputable study that can show that vaccines cause autism.  The whole debacle was caused by a researcher who faked his research (funded by solicitors seeking evidence against vaccines) and published in The Lancet, a reputable journal, that there was a link to vaccines and autism. The Lancet has since retracted the article.  You have faked research/information which was believed to be real by the people. Now that it is proven to be fake you still have people believing in the fake research questioning the real research and calling it fake. They believe in the fake research and disbelieve the real research so much that people say the researcher is a scapegoat.

The lines between real and fake research and real and fake news have become entangled, making me wonder how it can be fixed.  Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory journals has been disappeared.  Inside Higher Ed,  quotes a spokesperson for CU Denver (Beall’s employer) that “Beall made a ‘personal decision’ to take down the website.” There is much speculation online as to why he made this personal decision.  Reputable publishers do their best to sniff out fake research.  However, if reputable publishers publish questionable journal issues funded by drug companies and reputable publishers are bought by questionable companies it paints a picture of an industry that has problems policing itself.  Who is left to determine what is real and what is fake?

Which leaves me to end this post with a quote from one my favorite scifi movies, The Matrix.

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.

 

Masters of Illusion

One of my favorite scenes from the Simpsons is where bartender Moe sets up a fake upscale looking entrance to his bar to try and attract more customers.  After entering the bar the upscale customer says, “Hey, this isn’t faux dive. This is a dive,” to which Moe responds, “You’re a long way from home, yuppie-boy. I’ll start a tab.”

With just a few word changes and the same idea could be expressed about fake academic journals.  This has been a topic of discussion for the last few years in the library world.  The New York Times has an interesting and more mainstream article addressing the issue of fake journals and fake academic conferences.

In the article “Fake Academe, Looking Much Like the Real Thing” Kevin Carey, describes how he was contacted via phone call to attend a conference in Philadelphia a mere 20 minutes after he entered his information on a website.  Carey also goes on to describe how many of these real sounding “associations” can have shady if not outright illegal dealings and offer little to no academic rigor for paper submissions.

Unfortunately we live in a time when what is faux dive and real dive is getting harder and harder to determine.  Lots of people have fallen prey to fake news by re-posting the stories on the social media accounts.  People need to do more investigating to determine legitimate sources of information (news or academic).  However, we also live in a time where people often feel too rushed to do that.  Everything must be done NOW!  Wait for an article to come via ILL? Nope just find another one that is available online that can.

Unlike falling prey to fake news on social media, the fake “scholarly” associations, publications, etc. might cause the researcher more time and money than if they had slowed down and investigated things.  I know there are librarians who actively help their researchers avoid questionable publishers.  My guess though is that for every researcher a librarian helps there is another who falls victim.  Hopefully more mainstream stories like this will help alert others to do a little more digging.

InTOCicated by eTOCs

As you might gather from the post title, I love journal alerts (aka eTOCs) and here’s why:

  • They increase use of our expensive ejournals
  • They help keep clinicians up to date in their specialty
  • They repeatedly remind clinicians that the medical library exists; no small thing in these Googlesque days
  • They can be used to cross promote other library resources, services and news

We are a relatively small hospital library (two staff) which services around 5000 clients. Over the years, our ejournal alert service has grown to around 700 journal alerts, and is probably our most popular service.

The way it works is that all journal eTOCs come through one email and are forwarded to alert groups automatically via rules.

Our organisation used to have Groupwise for its email system and rules worked well with it. However on switching to Outlook, we quickly found that we could only create half a dozen or so rules before memory limitations were reached. After some searching, we found an Outlook add-in called Auto-Mate from Pergenex which came to the rescue. It’s an easy to use but powerful add-in, and it’s strangely gratifying to watch it automatically forward dozens of eTOCs each morning.

While signing up for eTOCs is a one off task, and forwarding of emails is automatic once rules have been set up, creating and modifying ejournal email groups is the most labor intensive part of the service. If I was to start the service again, I’d probably do it at the subject level (eg cardiology) rather than the title level (eg BMJ) as this would reduce the workload involved in adding and removing users from groups.

With a previous post – exporting Google Scholar citations to reference managers – I Kraftily used it as a Trojan horse to seek an answer to issue. Thanks to responders Farhad, Christine and especially Karen who provided the solution.

In a similar vein, I’m hoping a clever commenter out there can shed light on the following question:

Is there a way to have an online web form such that a user can make multiple selections (for the various eTOCs they are interested in) and which on submission updates multiple email groups (corresponding to the eTOCs they have selected/deselected). The email system doesn’t necessarily need to be Outlook. I thought this would be relatively straightforward process but as yet haven’t been able to find any offerings like this, despite playing around with the likes of MailChimp.

The JournalTOCs service has something like this available but our resolver wouldn’t work with their system alas alack alay

In any case, I remain a big fan of eTOCs and would be interested to hear if any other libraries have any comments, are using them in interesting ways or have any technology (not RSS ) that streamlines the process and so on

Thanks Rob

Designing Resources for Optimal Usage

Last week Clinical Key changed their interface and there was a big discussion about Clinical Key and how it works (or doesn’t) with Internet Explorer 8 & 9 on the Medlib-l listserv.  Basically the conversation fell into three categories.

  1. There was a general feeling that Elsevier did little to no testing of their website with hospital and other users.
    • Lack of functionality with IE 8 & 9 seem to indicate they didn’t test it very well using those browsers.
    • No A-Z alphabet listed for e-books and e-journals, so users have to wait for the entire list of e-books or e-journals to load and then scroll down to their title. Annoying, but not a big deal if your title begins with a C. But if you are J or another middle of the alphabet letter, it is worse than annoying.
    • Changing the way e-journals display a title.  In the past they displayed the title, current issue and then listed past issues on the page.  This is no longer the case and it makes finding the past issues very difficult. (update 10/2/14: ejournals now display current and past issues.)
  2. Most hospitals are stuck using Internet Explorer and often old versions of the software.
    • Many hospitals have legacy systems and are stuck on older operating systems which often dictate their browser software.  I know of one major hospital that has a goal of finally migrating to Windows 7 by Fall 2015.
    • If hospitals are a part of your clientele then it is a business imperative to know what the majority operating systems, browsers, and platforms your product will be used on.  Failure to do so means your product fails or is not used effectively. This leads to poor usage and will lead to non-renewal.
    • In general most hospital librarians CANNOT get their IT department to upgrade the hospital’s browsers.  At best they can get the computers in their library to have an upgraded or different browser, but they have no influence to have browsers upgraded elsewhere in the hospital.  It is naive to think otherwise.
  3. Academics have more flexibility and options regarding software and their IT departments are more open to other resources.
    • As a result they are often good places to try new things and experiment. However if the product will be offered to hospitals, vendors must be aware that what works at an academic institution may not work at a hospital.
    • While academic institution are concerned about privacy, in general they do not have to deal with HIPPA regulations.  This adds a layer of complexity to security that must be married to multiple hospital systems.

While the medlib-l discussion on Clinical Key could be boiled down into one of these three themes, it does impact more than just Clinical Key.  They are just the most recent example, but others have failed to understand the market they sell to.

Before a vendor decides to upgrade, they would do well to have beta testers from both hospitals and academic institutions (large and small) and make sure the company or programmers they are using to upgrade their product know design to the lowest common browser.  That won’t make things perfect, but it will help.

 

NEJM Publishes Erratum After Social Media Peer Review

I stumbled across this blog post a week ago and thought it was a wonderful example of the way social media can be used to better biomedical science.

The New England Journal of Medicine published an article in June on the prevention of MRSA in the ICU.  The study was very large, 74,256 patients, and the results looked impressive, BUT nobody could get the stats didn’t add up.  The numbers given in the published paper didn’t correlate with the Number-Needed to Treat (NNT)

A blog post on Intensive Care Network posted the following about the stats in the NEJM article:

ARE THE STATS CORRECT?

We were hashing this out in our journal club, but could not get the stats to add up.

If you can PLEASE COMMENT HERE!

The NNT’s of 54 and 181 seem impossibly small, with huge clinical implications.

Please try it yourself; look at Table 3. Frequency and Rates of Outcomes during the Baseline and Intervention Periods, According to Study Group

With bloodstream infection from any pathogen, the Group 1 (standard care) number of events per 1000 patient days is 4.1. With Group 3, the number of events is 3.6 per 1000 patients days. Even taking change from baseline into account and assuming these NNTs have been calcuated AFTER randomization, between Group 1 and Group 3, we get nowhere close to their NNT’s.

PLEASE have a go and see if you can match their NNT’s.

IF you can’t there is a serious problem, with practice changing implications.

It’s too late to write letters to the NEJM, so a robust discussion in a peer reviewed forum seems a good way to go.

 

The authors of blog post intention was to discuss the problem in “a peer reviewed forum” and according to them “there was lots of insightful commentary from around the globe.”

The fact that they were able to discuss problem with others around world is big but not unheard of, more and more scientists are discussing issues online.  To me the biggest thing is that the paper’s lead author, Susan Huang engaged in a discussion with the social media reviewers with a “prompt and gracious reply” agreed the published calculation was an error and showed “true scientific and academic integrity by contacting the NEJM as soon as there was a suggestion that the stats were incorrect.” NEJM responded by publishing an correction to the paper.

It is very cool how scientists discussed online a paper’s validity and work together to essentially provide world wide peer review.  However, what I find even cooler is that the author was engaged with the social media process AND a respected journal addressed and responded to the findings.  This is an example of everything that is right with social media and professional communication.  It will be interesting to see if we will see more of this type of world peer review in the future especially now that  PubMed Commons can also foster this kind of scientific inquiry and discussion.

NEJM is a big journal with lots of very smart authors contributing papers that are subjected to very peer reviewers, but still there can be mistakes.  World peer review via social media could help improve the process.  One question I keep wondering is, if we have this type of world peer review, could this cut down on the academic fraud that sometimes eludes the careful eyes of publishers’ peer reviewers?  What would have happened had Wakefield’s fraudulent study linking vaccines and autism (published in 1998) been published today?  Would that paper have had a chance to make it the general public’s consciousness and be as unfortunately influential as it still is today?

 

Plagiarism of Medical Text in Medical Apps

In a recent post, Timothy Aungst from iMedicalApps.com sheds more light on the trend of copying established medical textbooks and repurposing it in a medical app that they sell on iTunes.  Aungst cites a recent report in BMJ, where three doctors, “Afroze Khan, Zishan Sheikh, and Shahnawaz Khan face charges of dishonesty in knowingly copying structure, contents, and material from the Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal, by Narinder Gosall and Gurpal Gosall, when developing the app, representing it as their own work and seeking to make a gain from the plagiarised material.” Not only did the doctors plagiarize the text, but according to Aungst and BMJ the doctors also sought to increase their ratings within iTunes by writing reviews of their own apps without disclosing an conflict of interest.

This type of plagiarism is not new. In fact as Aungst states iMedicalApps.com Editor, Tom Lewis, discovered several apps in iTunes that plagiarized other works.  (I wrote a brief post about Tom’s finding while I was on vacation last year.) I can see from Tom’s comment that while he never heard directly from Elsevier regarding the issue, YoDev apps LLC had all of their apps pulled from the App Store.

Copying and re-posting a book online or through bit torrents for free is so 2005.  Welcome to the new world where plagiarizing can make you money. All you have to do is steal the content and sell it in an app.  They are also sneakier than they were in 2005.  They aren’t selling the app under the original book title, they are changing the name and trying to market it as something totally different.   Hmm it seems requiring users to use personal logins to view the PDF is really working to curb copyright violations.

***Update***

According to an updated BMJ article, the doctors accused of plagiarizing The Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal to use in their app Critical APPraisal, have been cleared of plagiarism by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.

“A regulatory panel rejected charges by the General Medical Council (GMC) that Afroze Khan, Shahnawaz Khan, and Zishan Sheikh acted dishonestly in knowingly copying structure, contents, and material from a book, The Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal, when developing their Critical APPraisal app, representing it as their own work, and seeking to make a gain from the material.”

Shahnawaz Khan and Afroze Khan were also accused of dishonestly posting positive reviews of the app on the Apple iTunes Store without disclosing that they were co-developers and had a financial interest in the app.  The GMC found that Shahnawaz Khan  no evidence that he knew that the app, which was initiallly free, would later sold for a fee. His case was concluded without any findings.  However, the GMC panel found that “Afroze Khan’s conduct in posting the review was misleading and dishonest.” Yet they considered this type of dishonesty to be “below the level that would constitute impairment of this fitness to practise.”  The GMC panel said it was an isolated incident and did not believe it would be repeated in which they “considered his good character and testimonials attesting to his general probity and honesty and decided not to issue a formal warning.”

The Journal App Wars

I have doctors asking about all four journal browsing apps; Docwise, Docphin, Read, and Browzine (click links for reviews on each app. The reviews were either done by me or guest librarians who had access to the app).  A few of the requesting doctors have used one of the above products, but it seems the vast majority of the doctors haven’t used any of the apps and are asking based on word of mouth. 

The four apps are very similar.  To me it is a bit like comparing PubMed vs Ovid Medline, both do the job well but differently.  You also have people who prefer one over the other.  One is free while the other is not. 

The biggest difference is that three of the apps show the abstracts and tables of contents to almost every medical journal known to man (I over exaggerate of course).  The full text is provided if the library/institution as a subscription to that journal.  However, there is no clear branding or explannation of what journals the library/instituion owns because Docwise, Docphin, and Read don’t know.   If a doctor views the table of contents for the Journal of Big Toe Science in Docwise, Docphin, or Read  (which is not owned by the library), the doctor is denied the full text.  Last time I checked, there was no clear message as to why they can’t get the full text. Docwise, Docphin, or Read didn’t say soemthing like, “Your library doesn’t subscribe to this journal therefore you can’t access the full text.” Docwise, Docphin, and Read do not know the library/institutions holding or access methods.

Browzine does know what the library/institution owns.  Because the library submits the list (with access methods) to Third Iron (the company that owns Browzine).  Browzine only shows those journals to doctors. There is no guessing as to whether it is available full text to the doctor.  If it is in Browzine, it should be available full text.

Let’s pretend that my hospital library provided proxy access to resources. (Most hospital libraries don’t have proxy servers to provide access to journals or other resources.)  I could have my pick of these apps to provide to my users.  My question for librarians is: Do I list all four apps and let them decide what they want?  I have a very strong feeling (based on 15 years of answering doctor’s library questions) that doctors are going to be complaining about Docwise, Docphin, or  Read not providing the full text.  After all, if the library recommended a product that connects users to the full text, shouldn’t everything be full text?

What do other libraries do?  Do you list all of the apps and let the users decide?  Do you worry that there might be confusion among the apps because they are so similar but slightly different? Do you worry that doctors might feel frustrated when they can’t get the full text? Would doctors even bother ordering the unavailable article (going outside of the app to do this) through the library? 

I appreciate your thoughts and comments. Because sometimes I feel with these journal apps I am being asked to pick between Coke and Pepsi, Ovid and PubMed.  I know the difference between them, but my users don’t. Does it matter?

Medical Library eBooks: Five Years Behind

When Fergie sang, “I’m so 3008. Your so 2000 and late”  I am 100% sure she was not singing about medical libraries and ebooks, but whenever I think of ebooks, libraries and publishers Fergie’s lyrics repeatedly ring through my head.

Public libraries and Amazon are ahead of medical libraries regarding ebooks.  Providers of medical library ebooks such as McGraw Hill Access databases, Ovid, Elsevier’s ClinicalKey, and others methods of providing ebooks are from the digital dinosaur age when a portable device was considered a laptop.

Not much has changed on how we provide our ebooks with these vendors.  Our users go to their website and view the book online like they are viewing a web page.  They do it the same way they did before the Kindle or iPad.  Not only is some of the content STILL in Flash (AccessSurgery) making those videos completely useless, but they treat viewing the ebooks on the iPad and Kindle as mini laptops which is limiting.  Kindles have been around since 2007 and the iPad has been around since 2010.  People have had between 3-6 years worth of downloading expectations that have been fostered by Amazon, Apple, and public libraries.

People’s concepts of an ebook have drastically changed.  The term ebook no longer refers to a book that is available online in HTML or  PDF.  Users now define an ebook as something DOWNLOADABLE to their device.  They are disappointed when they aren’t.  When I am asked if we have any ebooks and I say yes, the next question I am asked is how do they download them to their device.  When I tell them they can’t, they are immediately turned off.  They aren’t interested. 

I understand that these providers don’t want people downloading their books for free and keeping them forever.  However,  public libraries have already done a pretty good job at training our users for us and they have figured out methods to curb copyright and theft.  While users expect to download the book to their device, they also expect that the book will be returned or disappear from their device after a set period of time.  This is the way public libraries have done things.  This is the way iTunes and Amazon “rent” movies.   Amazon has been renting etextbooks and renting to ebooks to Prime members for a while.  It is cheaper to rent the Amazon book than to buy it, and Amazon customers can set their own expiration date (more expensive for longer terms).  Overdrive was founded in 1986 and has been working to provide public libraries with ebooks and materials since 2002 with their Digital Library Reserve, a digital download platform. People are well versed in the concep downloading an ebook to their device for a limited time.

Yet many medical ebook vendors are still plodding away with their ebooks that can only be viewed online, the same way they always had when all we had were laptops.  They have not evolved.  We are still looking at HTML or PDF versions of the print.  Yeah some ebooks have video content or interactive tests, but that isn’t any different than what was available in 2000.  As a result, when it comes to non-downloadable ebooks, we are losing our users. 

Have big publishers become too big to be agile to adapt to current technology?  Are their online publishing platforms too entrenched to be able to provide downloadable ebooks that can disappear (be “returned”) on a device?  Other companies do it.  Why don’t they?  Are they over invested in the way they used to do things that it is inhibiting the way things have evolved?  Or are they operating as usual and don’t really realize the demand to download the books? Only they know.  But one thing is for sure, their online ebook platforms days are limited.  I can’t say whether it is today or tomorrow but it is coming. The consumer demand for downloadable content is not waning, and the use of iPads within hospitals is growing.  According to EHR Intelligence a study conducted at Columbia University Medical Center in New York determined that “iPads were used frequently by residents attending rounds: 90% of residents reported referring to their iPads, since they are unable to leave their attending physician to use a PC elsewhere.” 

If they can’t use a PC to find information and are using their iPad instead, then the old way of offering ebooks via a web page  or PDF is like the Dodo bird. It is stuck on an electronic island with no means of leaving or evolving and being preyed upon by users expectations.

Updates on Edwin Mellen Press lawsuits

Another layer has been added to the issues surrounding the Edwin Mellen Press lawsuits.  Last week Scholarly Kitchen published a post explaining they removed two posts (and comments) by Rick Anderson discussing Edwin Mellen Press because they received letters from EMP threatening legal action. The letter tells Scholarly Kitchen, “We are putting you on notice that the moment Mr. Anderson publishes or provokes any statement about our company or authors that is the slightest bit defamatory, we will pursue legal action only against him, but your organization as well.”

Here is the full letter to Scholary Kitchen about Rick Anderson.  It also appears that Edwin Mellen Press is also holding Scholarly Kitchen liable for libelous comments made by the general readership.  Because in their Rick Anderson letter they also mention they enclosed a copy of a letter  to Kristine Hunt, who they claim posted libelous statements in response to Anderson’s blog.  EMP’s Anderson letter says, “We are bringing this information to your attention because you are the publishers of both Ms. Hunt’s statement and Mr. Anderson’s blog. As such, you have a legal obligation to monitor these types of comments. In order to limit any damage from such events, we request the immediate removal of Ms. Hunt’s comments from your blog.”

The letter to Kristin Hunt specifically states that EMP takes issue with two comments she made on Anderson’s post that they believe are harmful and untrue.  Their letter ends, “You have the right to seek legal counsel pertaining to this matter and, if you do so, your attorney should contact me directly.  If you do not consult an attorney, you are welcome to contact me yourself.  If I do not hear from you or your attorney by April 15, 2013, the Press will take legal action as it sees fit.”

Yikes! But there is more.

Roy Tennant with The Digital Shift published on Friday that Edwin Mellen Press registered domain names using Dale Askey’s name (Askey, to my knowledge, is still battling one of the two lawsuits brought by EMP).  Roy has the registration record  as an in the post showing DALEASKEY.COM registered to Edwin Mellen Press Ltd. address and has Iona Williams with an EMP email address as the administrative contact.

Dave Pattern mentions in the comments, that many sites (besides the Dale Askey ones) were registered by “pseudonymous  ‘Arthur Scholar’ (pen name of the blogger on the EMP site & also the EMP tweeter) has been used to register around 100 domains over the years.”  He says Iona (Margaret) Williams registered some other mellenpress domains and is listed as a contact on Mellen’s website and as a Secretary for the company at these two places

  • http://bit.ly/XSDvd0
  • http://bit.ly/Z3GbUz

 

I agree with Dave, in which I have no idea why anyone or any company would want to buy domain names that aren’t related to themselves.  Weird, and just to let my readers know. This is not an April Fool’s post.

(Total side note and apology to Rick Anderson, I can’t help it but every time I read the EMP letter all I can hear is Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) in the Matrix saying “Mr Anderson.” I bet there are times Rick and Dale wish they took the blue pill.)