U.S. Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles

[Ivo Skoric]

that's a nice one for the freedom of thought
ivo

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/24/1557214

Tuesday, February 24th, 2004
Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan,
Libya or Cuba

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control
recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored
in nations under trade embargoes which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan,
Libya and Cuba.

Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and
the treasury department says it is illegal to perform services for
embargoed nations. It can be punishable by fines of up to a
half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years.

·       Robert Bovenschulte, president of the publications division 
of
the American Chemical Society, which decided this week decided to
challenge the government and risk criminal prosecution by editing
articles submitted from the five embargoed nations.

TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets
Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works
authored in nations under trade embargoes, which include, Iran, Iraq,
Sudan, Libya and Cuba. Although publishing the articles is legal,
editing is a, quote, service, and the Treasury Department says it's
illegal to perform services for embargoed nations. It can be
punishable by fines of up to half a million dollars or jail terms as
long as ten years. Robert Bovenschulte is with the American Chemical
Society, which decided this week to challenge the government and 
risks
criminal prosecution by editing articles submitted from these five
embargoed nations. Can you talk more about this decision?

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE: Certainly. Let me make clear first of all that 
we
are by no means alone in taking this position. In fact, there are 
very
few publishers that have decided to restrict their normal publishing
activities as a result of the OFAC ruling, which was issued in late
September. The difference for the American Chemical Society, which, 
by
the way, is the largest professional society in the world with 
160,000
members, was to take a moratorium and put that in place in November
while we studied the impact of the ruling, and the legal situation 
and
sorted out our options. Because, therefore, we have now lifted the
moratorium, we have actually have more attention paid to us than
perhaps is necessary, because in fact, major commercial publishers 
and
other society publishers like the American Chemical Society are in
fact continuing to publish just as they have. Most of them never
stopped. We simply took a pause to reassess the situation. It is very
peculiar. You can divide the so-called services into two categories;
one is the traditional peer review function whereby noted scientists
in given fields are asked by our editors, who are also experts, to
review a given article and make a judgment about it, whether it is
publishable or not, whether it's important work, and also to offer
comments that might improve the work. The second category has to do
with what is regarded as copy editing and this means, of course,
correcting grammar, rewriting some sentences in minor ways, changing
punctuation, and conforming the material to a given style guideline.
Curiously, the OFAC ruling when it came out in late September seemed
to permit peer review, but very definitely prohibited this copy
editing function. We had clarification from OFAC that probably peer
review is indeed permissible and does not violate the trade embargo.
We believe however, that this needs to be cleared up in its entirety.
And the copy editing matter is particularly curious because --
basically, they are alleging that some important service is being
provided by a person who sits there and makes sure that the language
of the paper -- these are highly technical papers, by the way, that
the language has appropriate English and conforms to publishers' 
style
guidelines. This is curious to us and we cannot understand really 
what
the rationale for that prohibition is. So, publishers under the
auspices of the Association of American Publishers, which is our 
trade
association, have in fact formed a litigation task force. We haven't
yet taken action and haven't even decided that we will take action.
But we believe we are on very good grounds, legally, on two bases. 
One
is the first amendment, our right to publish, because what OFAC is
doing is a classic example of prior restraint; the second is the
so-called Berman amendment, which was passed in 1988 by Congressman
Howard Berman, who is still in the Congress. His amendment exempted
information materials from the items that would be applicable under
trade embargo. So, we believe we're on good legal grounds. We have
lifted the embargo - sorry - we have lifted the moratorium, because 
we
do not want to restrict publication since this is a worldwide 
activity
and we believe the only basis for deciding what to publish should be
the merits of the science.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you can public articles, research papers from Iran,
Iraq, Sudan, Libya, and Cuba, as long as they have mistakes in them?

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE: That's one way of looking at it. The mistakes
that we would catch in a copy editing process would be relatively
minor in terms of the substance of the article. We were very 
concerned
that the -- if peer review was denied or peer review could be done,
but the comments from the peer reviewers could not be sent to the
authors for correction, that would involve then potentially really
substantive errors or mistakes in those papers. And of course, we did
not want to be publishing something that might contain errors that we
could have caught through the peer review process.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there a specific article right now that you are
working on that you are editing from a particular embargoed country?

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE: We are working on a number of papers at the
moment. I believe most, if not all of them, are from Iran. There have
been a few from Cuba, but I don't know where they are in the process
right now. But, yes, we are definitely working on multiple papers. We
had 195 subcommissions from Iran in 2003, and published 60 of those
papers.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does the government contend is the danger of
these reports?

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE: The OFAC logic appeals to a concept of providing
services.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to explain OFAC, of course, Office of 
Foreign
Assets Control in the Treasury Department.

ROBERT BOVENSCHULTE: Right. And they have said, while peer review is
probably okay, but if we edit material, we as American citizens are
providing a service to the authors in those countries, and that is
prohibited. We find this an absolutely bizarre ruling because there 
is
-- we cannot see that there is any risk at all to national security 
or
on any other grounds that would lead any reasonable person to 
prohibit
copy editing, And furthermore, we don't see why they would make such
an issue out of this. One straw in the wind is - and very bothersome 
–
this all began, as a matter of prologue, this all began because the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ran into a problem
in a conference that they ran in Iran about two years or so ago. And
they had difficulty then bringing funds back from Iran and that's
where this issue first arose, and then it cascaded into questions
about publication. The IEEE, I just mentioned, has applied for a
license because OFAC has said that if you apply for a license to do
this prohibited activity, we will consider it on the merits of the
individual case and render a judgment whether we will permit you to 
go
ahead and do your normal activities, or some subset of those normal
activities. Now, IEEE is still waiting on their license application,
which they submitted in October. What worries us as publishers
generally about this, is that we are in the position, if we apply for
a license, asking permission of the government as to what we ought to
publish, and how we ought to publish it. We believe that is a
fundamental violation of the first amendment. And so, our principled
stance at the American Chemical Society is, we are not going to apply
for a license. If we must fight this legally in concert with other
line-minded publishers, of which there are many, that's what we will
have to do.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for joining us and finally ask
Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists where you go from
here. You have published this major report. You have more than 70
scientists. 20 of them Nobel laureates, who are now protesting the
Bush White House's politicizing of science. What happens next?

ALDEN MEYER: Well, there's several things that are going on, Amy. 
One,
we are opening the statement that was issued last week to signature 
by
the general scientific community, engineering community, medical
community and then the week since it was issued without much effort 
on
our part, there has been over 1,000 scientists that have signed on to
the statement via our website. We will be taking that out
systematically to associations and networks of scientists and doctors
and engineers around the country to try to demonstrate the breadth 
and
depth of the concern about this process. Of course, we are continuing
to investigate and pursue leads to document additional examples of
abuse. I should say this is not just a pattern at individual 
agencies.
There's actually a proposal that's been made by the Office of
Management and Budget to centralize control over the peer review
process at federal agencies across the government. And in a rather
Orwellian twist on conflict of interest, their proposed rule would 
ban
most independent academic scientists who may receive funding or
government grants for the research from federal agencies from -- in
most cases serving on independent peer review panels on scientific 
and
technical studies, but would permit scientists whose funding is from
the industries regulated by the agencies to serve as peer reviewers,
as long as they did not have a direct personal financial conflict of
interest. So it sort of turns the notion of special interest on its
head. So that's another process we are following quite actively, and
trying to encourage the OMB to drop this proposed rule. We're also
talking with people up on Capitol Hill, both Democrats and
Republicans. There's obviously broad concern about this problem. 
We're
trying to get the relevant committees up there to do their own
investigations, hold some oversight hearings, and consider the need
for either legislation or rule makings that would put some guidelines
in place to prevent this kind of abuse from happening in the future.
That would include looking at conflict of interest rules. That could
include recreating some kind of independent scientific advisory
capacity within the Congress itself, such as it had before, the 
Office
of Technology Assessment was disbanded in 1995. It could include
reviewing the Federal Advisory Committee Act guidelines for
appointments to independent scientific advisory committees across the
government. There's a host of areas that we think Congress ought to
look at and consider the need for action to prevent these abuses in
the future.

AMY GOODMAN: The Union of Concerned Scientists' website is --

ALDEN MEYER: It's www.ucsusa.org.

AMY GOODMAN: Alden Meyer, with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Thanks for being with us.




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