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

  • From: "Jonn Mero" <jmero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 07:30:19 -0800

Ah, just give the texas moron another 4 years, and you'll get a taste of
a terrorist regime in full bloom! 

-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of George Mena
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 3:15 PM
To: Andrew Davis (E-mail); Aprille Pihl (E-mail); Austechwriter
(E-mail); Dan Wiltshire (E-mail); David Herder (E-mail); Elisa Ma
(E-mail); Jim Gulledge (E-mail); John Gilger (E-mail); Keith Sellers
(Work) (E-mail); Kris Westrum (E-mail); Marc Smircich (E-mail); Nadeem
Hasan (E-mail); Smokey Lynne Bare (E-mail); Tom Hayes (E-mail); Abby
Stoner (E-mail)
Subject: atw: FW: Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran,
Iraq, Sudan,Libya or Cuba
Importance: High

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/


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