ogni giorno, informazione dall'Iraq occupato / every day, information from occupied Iraq

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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.
[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
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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.



www.uruknet.info <http://www.uruknet.info>:
a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news,
analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian
and English. A lash to official statements and to occupants and all
their flankers, in defence of the country that, most of all, has
supported, encouraged and aided Palestine and liberation struggles in
Middle Orient and al-jazeerah, without giving in in favour of
pseudo-integralist movements remote-controlled from Washington.

Any link will be greatly appreciated: you can get our banner or link
coordinates from our homepage. Please let us know about new links, so
that we can recall them in our link-page.

<http://www.uruknet.info>

www.uruknet.info <http://www.uruknet.info>:
finalmente, un sito dove trovare informazione aggiornata sull'iraq
occupato: notizie, analisi, documenti e testi sulla resistenza in
italiano e in inglese, aggiornate ogni giorno. una frustata alle
versioni ufficiali e contro tutti i fiancheggiatori delle forze
occupanti, a difesa del paese che più di ogni altro ha appoggiato,
incoraggiato, aiutato la palestina e le lotte di liberazione nel medio
oriente, senza cedimenti verso pseudo-movimenti integralisti teleguidati
da Washington.

Un grazie fin d'ora per ogni link al ns. sito: potrete scaricare il
banner e trovare le coordinate sulla testata della ns. homepage.
Informateci di ogni nuovo link, in modo da poter contraccambiare e
segnalarlo.

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informazione dall'iraq occupato
information from occupied iraq


    <http://www.uruknet.info>



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.
[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 -
<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&amount=25&business=order at democracynow.org&item_name=Democracy%20Now&no_shipping=1&return=http://www.democracynow.org/thankyou.htm&cancel_return=http://www.democracynow.org>$25,<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&amount=50&business=order at democracynow.org&item_name=Democracy%20Now&no_shipping=1&return=http://www.democracynow.org/thankyou.htm&cancel_return=http://www.democracynow.org>$50,
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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.



<http://www.uruknet.info>www.uruknet.info:
a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news,
analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and
English. A lash to official statements and to occupants and all their
flankers, in defence of the country that, most of all, has supported,
encouraged and aided Palestine and liberation struggles in Middle Orient
and al-jazeerah, without giving in in favour of pseudo-integralist
movements remote-controlled from Washington.

Any link will be greatly appreciated: you can get our banner or link
coordinates from our homepage. Please let us know about new links, so that
we can recall them in our link-page.

<http://www.uruknet.info>
<http://www.uruknet.info>www.uruknet.info:
finalmente, un sito dove trovare informazione aggiornata sull'iraq
occupato: notizie, analisi, documenti e testi sulla resistenza in italiano
e in inglese, aggiornate ogni giorno. una frustata alle versioni ufficiali
e contro tutti i fiancheggiatori delle forze occupanti, a difesa del paese
che più di ogni altro ha appoggiato, incoraggiato, aiutato la palestina e
le lotte di liberazione nel medio oriente, senza cedimenti verso
pseudo-movimenti integralisti teleguidati da Washington.

Un grazie fin d'ora per ogni link al ns. sito: potrete scaricare il banner
e trovare le coordinate sulla testata della ns. homepage. Informateci di
ogni nuovo link, in modo da poter contraccambiare e segnalarlo.

uruknet.info

informazione dall'iraq occupato

information from occupied iraq

<http://www.uruknet.info>