The US-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 350,000 members worldwide, including 2,000 members in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the Sudan. Because the US has a trade embargo against these nations, the IEEE has felt obliged to deny these members all the goods and services prohibited by US trade laws. This has meant blocking these members from reading the IEEE online journals and barring editors of IEEE journals from editing their papers. As the IEEE reads US trade laws, it could accept papers from these members but could not edit them, since editing was a "service" that falls under the trade embargo. Six other international scientific and engineering societies contacted by the Chronicle of Higher Education did not read the law the same way, and edited accepted papers by any author.
Last December the IEEE asked the US Treasury Department to clarify the law on this point, and the clarification came down on Wednesday. The IEEE was right: editing is verboten. The only concession allowed by the Treasury Department is that journals may apply for a license to edit papers from the embargoed countries. For more details, see Lila Guterman, U.S. Policy Restricts Scientific Publishing by Researchers in Countries Under Trade Embargo, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2, 2003. The article is accessible only to CHE subscribers (free online excerpts).
(PS: I can't find the Treasury Department letter at the IEEE or Treasury web sites. If you can, please let me know. I'd also like to know what an organization must promise in order to receive a US government license to edit scientific or scholarly papers by citizens of embargoed countries. Finally, I'd like to hear from US journals that violate the embargo in this way. Do you plan to change your policies? What consequences, if any, have you suffered for putting academic freedom ahead of the trade embargo?)
Update. The Chronicle has made Guterman's article freely available at a new URL.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/03/2003 01:16:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
