atw: FW: Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan,Libya or Cuba

Hello all,
 
This one is for all of us who make our living as technical writers.
 
The forwarded message attached is from Sonoma State University's Project 
Censored, which helps journalism students at Sonoma State hone their 
investigative reportage skills while still in college. I first heard about them 
back in 1978, when I was a journalism student at San Francisco State University.
 
While I am no fan of Fidel the Infidel Castro, Ayat Allah Khameini, Saddam The 
Madam Hussein, or whoever's pretending to be in charge in the Sudan (a known 
terrorist haven in eastern Africa), to see both the IEEE *and* the American 
Chemical Society mentioned in this Project Censored interview transcript is 
more than a little bit unnerving.
 
And the scary thing is, I really do see why the US Treasury Department's Office 
of Foreign Assets Control is doing this.
 
Brrrrrrr........
 
George Mena
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Phillips [mailto:peter.phillips@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 2:10 PM
To: Project-Censored-L@xxxxxxxxxx; Prime@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Fwd: Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, 
Sudan,Libya or Cuba








Tuesday, February 24th, 2004

Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya or 
Cuba




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






 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. [includes 
transcript]

 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

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide 
closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank 
you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

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.


 To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program,  click here for our 
new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

--




Greg Ruggiero | Editor | Seven Stories Press | www.sevenstories.com



-- 
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/


**************************************************
To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to 
austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to 
austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field.

To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 
"unsubscribe" in the Subject field.

To search the austechwriter archives, go to 
www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter

To contact the list administrator, send a message to 
austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
**************************************************

Other related posts: