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

  • From: "Erisa Linsky" <slinka@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 11:31:24 +1100

A new job market  in Iran Iraq Sudan Libya... and Cuba....For English
language writers who dont have US citizenship.
----- Original Message ----- 
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>;
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<nhasan@xxxxxxxx>; "Smokey Lynne Bare (E-mail)" <slbare@xxxxxxxx>; "Tom
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<abby.stoner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2004 10:14 AM
Subject: 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/


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