The petition arose out of a letter sent to Niko Pfund, president of OUP USA, about the book Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

The signatories were Frances Moore Lapp¨¦ ¨C co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and author of Diet for a Small Planet ¨C and six other experts in the field of food, agriculture and rural development.

While acknowledging that ¡°our analysis of food policy differs from that of the author¡±, they flagged up 16 pages of alleged flaws in Professor Paarlberg¡¯s book, noting that he had failed to provide citations for some of his claims and had not disclosed that he had ¡°served on the Biotechnology Advisory Company of the Monsanto Company¡±.

The letters writers also argued that Food Politics was a ¡°strongly partisan¡± text that had been misleadingly marketed by OUP as a dispassionate overview of ¡°conflicting claims¡±.

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Not satisfied with the response from Professor Paarlberg¡¯s editor, the group then put together a petition calling on OUP to adopt as policy: ¡°citations for evidence-based claims; disclosure of potential conflict of interest, whether financial or other associations; and accurate representation of the publication by the Press in its promotion¡±.

Signed by more than 5,000 individuals from 55 countries, the petition was presented to the delegates of OUP as well as to the office of the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford on 25 April.

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A spokesman for OUP commented: ¡°We have reviewed our extensive pre-publication vetting of Robert Paarlberg¡¯s manuscript, and of the published work itself, which has reaffirmed our confidence in the book.

¡°The politics of food production are an ideologically contentious subject; while we respect the right of others to engage and disagree, we reject any suggestion that the scholarly standards of this book, or those of OUP¡¯s wider publishing programme, are flawed.¡±

Addressing the claims over a lack of citations, the spokesman added that while titles ¡°intended purely for scholarly audiences¡± were ¡°heavily footnoted and referenced¡±, books for university students and general readers ¡°often rely instead on suggestions for further reading and bibliographies¡±.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com