Academic Publishing in Canada: A Lament

With regard to David Malone’s review of Bringing Power to Justice? The Prospects of the International Criminal Court October, the conference and book project to which this work relates gave the editors an opportunity to introduce students, and then readers, to thought-provoking articles of good quality, from diverse perspectives.

Our goal was to aid thinking about the future of the International Criminal Court—a future that has yet to be determined. Our efforts resulted in a collection of essays eventually made available to the general public at a reasonable price. It is simply a fact of life that university presses proceed at a very deliberate pace. Your reviewer makes brief unargued assertions about unnecessary footnotes in Dapo Akande’s chapter, about jargon in Antonio Franceschet’s chapter and about a lack of realism in Catherine Lu’s chapter. We regard these assertions as having no merit, and hope that readers will not be dissuaded from learning from these excellent discussions. As for the issue of an index, some collective volumes do have indexes, and some do not; when the component parts are highly individual in their approach, it is a judgement call, and it is a bit much to be accused of unprofessional negligence just because we made a judgement different from your reviewer’s. We leave others to judge whether the attack on academic presses in Canada will assist our struggling publishing industry. We pass over in polite silence your reviewer’s ad hominem suspicions about our motives in producing this book.