Some flout moratorium on papers by scientists from 4 countries
As scientific publishers struggle to understand how U.S. trade embargoes affect them, one large scholarly group has decided to defy U.S. Treasury Department regulations. In mid-February the American Chemical Society ended its own temporary moratorium on publishing papers by scientists in countries under such embargoes -- Cuba, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.
The society, which publishes 32 journals, adopted the moratorium in November 2003, after a September 30 ruling by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control stated that publishers would need special licenses to edit papers submitted by researchers in embargoed countries.
Dozens of publishers, including the American Institute of Physics, have ignored the regulations, while others are abiding by them, fearing the penalties. Violators -- including, potentially, journal editors and officers of the sponsoring associations -- can incur fines as high as $500,000 and sentences of up to 10 years in jail.
The government’s rationale for the policy is that editing papers by the foreign scientists provides them with a service, which constitutes a violation of the trade embargo.
The chemical society’s moratorium was intended to be a temporary one, while the group investigated its options, said Robert D. Bovenschulte, president of the publications division. Its journals received 195 papers from embargoed countries in 2003, when the trade restrictions included Iraq for part of the year. “We believe that it makes more sense for us now to go back to business as normal and publish papers from these countries using our normal peer-review and publishing processes,” he said.
Engineering Debate
The issue came to the attention of scholarly publishers last fall, thanks to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, which had hundreds of Iranian members, most of whom have since resigned their membership. In December 2002 it asked the Treasury Department office, commonly known as OFAC, for clarification as to whether the institute’s activities were restricted by trade embargoes. Congress exempted “information or informational materials” from such embargoes in a measure called the Berman Amendment to the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988.
But OFAC subsequently took a stricter view, exempting only “information and informational materials” that had been “fully created” by people in the embargoed countries and had received no “substantive or artistic alteration or enhancement” in the United States. The American Association of Publishers, a trade group, said in an open letter earlier this year that “it is unclear what authority OFAC can claim to justify this dramatic narrowing of the exemption. ...”
The engineering institute, better known as IEEE, argued in its 2002 letter to the Treasury Department office that peer review and editing did not provide services to Iranian authors -- editing, in fact, affected only papers to which the institute already held the copyright -- and that communications to authors in Iran should be protected speech under the First Amendment.
The OFAC response was the September 2003 ruling from its director, R. Richard Newcomb, in which he said that while peer review and communicating with authors were exempt from trade embargoes, a special license would be required for “activities such as the reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, grammar, and replacement of inappropriate words by U.S. persons.”
In October, a week later, the engineering institute again wrote to OFAC, requesting a license to edit papers written by researchers in Iran. Once more the IEEE argued that because it holds the copyright to any manuscript accepted for publication, editing that manuscript provides no service to the author. “IEEE is simply enhancing or altering its own legal property, not that of the Iranian author, and any final editing and revision occurs for the benefit of IEEE and its readership, not for the sake of the Iranian author,” the institute’s lawyers wrote.
“We feel that copy and style editing should be exempt,” said Michael Lightner, the institute’s vice president for publications, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The hope is that we will convince them.”
The Treasury Department office has not responded to the IEEE’s letter, but Mr. Lightner says he hopes to hear from OFAC in the next few weeks. Until then, the institute is declining to edit manuscripts from authors in the embargoed countries, although it will accept submissions to its journals and publish those that pass peer review and are accepted by a journal editor. Those papers may be accompanied by a note indicating that they have not been edited.
Other scholarly publishers also have begun to seek ways to deal with the OFAC regulations and perhaps to get them changed. In late January the American Association of Publishers supplied its members with background information on the office’s rules and on legislation that covers publishing materials by authors in embargoed countries. “The OFAC interpretive rulings ... constitute a serious threat to the U.S. publishing community,” said the public letter, written by the group’s Allan Adler and Marc H. Brodsky.
The association and several publishers have also met with President Bush’s science adviser, John H. Marburger III; with officials in the State and Treasury Departments; and with members of Congress. After meeting with the publishers, Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat, who wrote the Berman Amendment in 1988, has revisited the topic. His spokesman, Douglas J. Campbell, says OFAC’s regulations take “a too-narrow reading” of the amendment.
“His intent was to include this sort of interaction,” says Mr. Campbell. “If OFAC refuses to interpret it in a way that we think is appropriate, it may take further legislation to clarify what is and is not allowed.”
The publishers’ group is also considering a legal challenge to the regulations. “For people engaged in First Amendment activities, it’s wholly inappropriate government intervention,” said Mr. Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs.
About 30 publishers discussed the regulations in February at a meeting organized by the engineering institute. A representative of OFAC attended to present the agency’s standpoint.
Fight, Flout, or Fall in Line?
Scholarly publishers vary widely in their responses to the regulations. Some have gone even further than the IEEE, declining to publish any articles whose authors live in the embargoed countries. One such publisher is the American Society for Microbiology. “From my own personal perspective, I would just as soon proceed to do business as usual and see what happens,” said Samuel Kaplan, head of the society’s publications board and a professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical School. But he worries about the fines that could come if the society were to ignore the regulations. “Unfortunately, I have a certain responsibility to the fiscal integrity of the society,” he said.
Others are flouting rules they consider irrational and illegal. “Why should a publisher have to ask its government for a license to publish? Publishing is a First Amendment-protected thing, recognized in the legislation that authorizes the president to impose embargoes,” said Mr. Brodsky, who is chairman of the professional and scholarly publishing division of the American Association of Publishers. He is also executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which is continuing to accept and publish manuscripts regardless of where an author lives.
The American Chemical Society has come around to the same position. Mr. Bovenschulte, the head of publications, says he gained hope at the meeting with the OFAC representative that the government will change course and allow editing. If it does not, he says, “we felt we were on good legal grounds to challenge the ruling.”
The chemical society, he said, is willing to risk disregarding the regulations in order to satisfy its own ethical guidelines, which require editors to consider manuscripts without bias, and regardless of an author’s nationality. Rejecting papers on the basis of their authors’ country of origin is, “frankly, inimical to the advancement of science, which is a worldwide activity,” he said. “The principle is that we should consider what to publish based upon its scientific merit, and that’s it. Full stop.”
A Treasury Department official who requested anonymity says OFAC is reconsidering the issue. The agency is examining whether editing substantively changes an article, and if such emendations take place before or after the import of the materials. “We’d like to get back to the IEEE as soon as possible,” the official says. “I’m very hopeful that there will be something general coming out that would provide guidance to everyone with a stake in this.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 26, Page A15
