Two American academic societies have reversed their policies toward Iranian scientists. One, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), has decided to no longer prohibit Iranian authors from publishing in its journals, while the American Concrete Institute (ACI) has decided to install a new ban barring Iranian students from taking part in an annual engineering competition they routinely enter each year....AIAA enacted the ban because the board feared it might be violating US embargo law....In September 2003, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled that the little-known embargo law prohibited the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) from editing manuscripts from all embargoed countries, leaving it with no choice but to publish them unedited or reject them. Subsequently, a few other scientific societies stopped publishing Iranians after the IEEE decision out of fear that OFAC would also charge them with a crime. A consortium of academic publishers and societies led by the Association of American Publishers pressed OFAC for over a year to drop the embargo, but to no avail. Last October, the consortium sued the agency, and last December, OFAC reversed its decision, granting a general license to all US publishers to edit and publish material from embargoed nations. Marc Brodsky, CEO of the American Institute of Physics and a central figure in the publishers' lawsuit, told The Scientist that OFAC's reversal means AIAA never needed to ban Iranian articles....Last January, the American Concrete Institute (ACI) decided to ban Iranian students from taking part in its annual international student engineering competition after OFAC ruled that certification courses ACI had been offering to Iranian professionals were illegal, because they provided a service. Students from Cuba and Sudan were also banned from the competition, although none have entered the contest, according to William Tolley, ACI'S executive vice president. Tolley told The Scientist that since his organization had never known it was violating OFAC's rules until the agency began investigating, it decided to temporarily exclude Iranian students from the competition while it asked OFAC whether their participation was legal. However, Tolley said he has written to OFAC four times—most recently in September-- and he still doesn't have an answer.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/05/2005 12:35:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
