atw: FW: Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan,Libya or Cuba
- From: "George Mena" <George.Mena@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Andrew Davis (E-mail)" <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,"Aprille Pihl (E-mail)" <aj_pihl@xxxxxxxxx>,"Austechwriter (E-mail)" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,"Dan Wiltshire (E-mail)" <dwiltshire@xxxxxxxx>,"David Herder (E-mail)" <david.herder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,"Elisa Ma (E-mail)" <ewordsmith@xxxxxxxxx>,"Jim Gulledge (E-mail)" <ra1256@xxxxxxxxxxx>,"John Gilger (E-mail)" <JGilger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,"Keith Sellers (Work) (E-mail)" <keith.sellers@xxxxxxx>,"Kris Westrum (E-mail)" <kris.westrum@xxxxxxx>,"Marc Smircich (E-mail)" <heraclytus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,"Nadeem Hasan (E-mail)" <nhasan@xxxxxxxx>,"Smokey Lynne Bare (E-mail)" <slbare@xxxxxxxx>,"Tom Hayes (E-mail)" <write12me@xxxxxxxxx>,"Abby Stoner (E-mail)" <abby.stoner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 15:14:59 -0800
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
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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.
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/
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