Ban Is Eased on Editing Foreign Work

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Ban Is Eased on Editing Foreign Work

April 5, 2004
 By THE NEW YORK TIMES





WASHINGTON, April 4 - The federal government has eased a
ban on editing manuscripts from nations that are under
United States trade embargoes, a move that appears to leave
publishers free once again to edit scholarly works from
Iran and other such countries.

The Treasury Department sent a letter on Friday to a lawyer
for the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers,
an international group representing more than 360,000
engineers and scientists, saying the organization's peer
review, editing and publishing was "not constrained" by
regulations from the department's Office of Foreign Assets
Control. The group says its members produce 30 percent of
the world's literature in electrical and electronics
engineering and computer science.

The letter from the Treasury Department referred
specifically to publishing by the institute, but Arthur
Winston, the group's president, said he believed the ruling
would be "a relief for nearly everyone" in the scholarly
publishing community.

"The ruling eliminates potentially disturbing U.S.
government intrusions on our scholarly publishing process,"
Mr. Winston said.

No one at the Treasury Department could be reached for
comment Sunday night on the ruling.

The department and publishers have long quarreled over the
exemption of "information or informational materials" from
the nation's trade embargoes. Congress has generally
allowed such exemptions.

Nonetheless, the Treasury Department sent out advisory
letters over the past year telling publishers who were
editing material from a country under a trade embargo that
they were forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences,
correct syntax or grammar, replace "inappropriate words" or
add illustrations.

The advisories concerned Iran, but experts said the ruling
seemed to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other
nations with which most trade is banned without a
government license.

In theory, even routine editing on manuscripts from those
countries could have subjected publishers to fines of
$500,000 and 10 years in jail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/politics/05PUBL.html?ex=1082148579&ei=1&en=b4429c6bc9f7b5c7

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