On January 23, the AAP Professional and Scholarly Publishers Division (PSP) released a public letter criticizing the U.S. Treasury Department for applying trade embargoes to scientific publications. The PSP believes the ruling not only violates the First Amendment rights of U.S. publishers, but violates the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the Treasury Department was supposed to be enforcing. Excerpt: The Treasury Department ruling and regulations "constitute a serious threat to the U.S. publishing community in general and to scholarly and scientific publishers in particular. The threat is not only to the practical viability of publishing as an important export industry, if other countries perceive that the U.S. is trying to license and limit the submission and processing of manuscripts in ways that are inimical to traditional standards of the scholarly and scientific communities regarding the free dissemination of information, but also to the basic First Amendment right of publishers to be free of government-imposed prior restraints on publication. Several organizations are currently considering...a possible legal challenge to the regulations, as well as possible discussions with the Executive Branch officials and Members of Congress regarding possible revisions to the regulations or to the statutory authority governing their promulgation." (PS: I've criticized the PSP position on open access, but I applaud this position on the embargo of scientific publications.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2004 03:59:00 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.
