Some US journal editors still interpret the US trade embargo against Iran as prohibiting the editing and publishing of articles by Iranian scholars. While this was once the correct interpretation of idiotic rules, recent amendments have made it doubtful.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationreports that the latest two articles to be snagged this way have been published in Britain instead. Excerpt:
This spring two petroleum-geology papers got stuck in a morass of government regulations. After having received acceptance notifications from AAPG Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association of Petroleum Geology, the papers were rejected because the authors had indirect ties to the Iranian government (The Chronicle, April 20). The association’s move was criticized by some as overly cautious, but the journal editors feared breaking a U.S. Treasury Department rule that allows American publishers to edit and publish papers by authors in certain countries under a trade embargo, including Iran, only if the authors are not part of that country’s government.
Now both papers, whose authors are in Norway and Iran, have been accepted and await publication this summer by Petroleum Geoscience. The difference? That journal is published by the Geological Society Publishing House, a British organization.
Comment. I am one who thinks the AAPG Bulletin was being overly cautious, but I also blame the US Treasury Department for vaguely relaxing the ban on scientific editing rather than clearly and utterly repealing it. Kudos to Petroleum Geoscience (although it is not OA) for refusing to let politics interfere with science.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/27/2006 12:19:00 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.
