Yale University Press has been forced onto the defensive, amid accusations that it is unfairly curtailing a social scientist's ability to publish her research.
The publisher has refused to print 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a book discussing the controversy these images created when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.
Yale press is due to publish an analysis of these events by Jytte Klausen, professor of politics at Brandeis University, but is being attacked over its decision to omit the controversial material and any other images of Mohammed from the book.
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Publishers, was one of many expressing their outrage at this perceived censorship of an academic publishing their research.
"'We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.' That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press," he said last week.
The row over Klausen's book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, has continued to simmer since then. John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, told the NY Times he has published other controversial tomes, but that "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question".
Experts apparently told the company that republication ran the risk of inciting violence. The original publication of the cartoons led to outrage and protests in parts of the Muslim world, where some believe that any images of Mohammed are blasphemous, let alone those showing him wearing a bomb on his head as one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons did.
"I regard the experts' advice to the university as alarmist and misplaced," Klausen told Fox News.
The cartoons are widely availably on the internet.