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Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

On Dec. 15, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a new ruling that allows Americans to "freely engage in most ordinary publishing activities with persons in Cuba, Iran and Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on certain interactions with the governments, government officials, and people acting on behalf of the governments of those countries."

This ruling stems from an earlier ruling issued by OFAC in 2003 that prohibited any U.S. publisher or author from making any editorial changes, without a government-issued license, on works produced by individuals residing in countries subject to U.S.-trade embargoes. On October 4, 2004, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing division (AAP/PSP), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), PEN American Center (PEN), and Arcade Publishing filed suit against OFAC claiming that the ruling to seek government permission to publish materials from U.S. trade-embargoed countries violated trade policies and the First Amendment.

Press release issued by the Treasury Department on this ruling "Treasury Issues General License for Publishing Activities"

Background:

In September 2003, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) determined that the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) would no longer be allowed to publish scientific papers by Iranian authors if any copy-editing is undertaken. The ruling applied to all publishing houses that print articles or manuscripts from countries that are under a U.S. trade embargo, unless they receive a special license granted by OFAC to do so. The U.S. government's position behind this ruling is that editing papers, which includes changing a single comma, by the foreign authors provides them with a service and therefore violates the trade embargo.

In April of 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) received a ruling from OFAC, which they deemed as acceptable, but critics highly disagreed. "The April IEEE ruling only permitted eight very specific and narrowly defined activities, like correcting spelling and adjusting line weights in illustrations," explained AAUP executive director Peter Givler. "That particular ruling offers no comfort to any publisher whose copy editing practices may be different than IEEE's, and says nothing at all about other kinds of editing, especially those relevant to books from another culture, where an editor may be quite closely involved in working with the author in developing the manuscript for a U.S. audience." Givler also said the OFAC rulings were already having a chilling effect of scholarly publishing. For example, he noted, the University of Alabama Press has been forced to suspend publication of two books by Cuban scholars due to OFAC regulations.

Additional Materials

The Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers has issued an analysis of OFAC’s Interpretation of IEEPA’s "Informational Materials" Exemption, by Allen Adler (AAP) and Marc Brodsky (PSP), January 23, 2004.

In February of 2004, the American Chemical Society abandoned its own temporary moratorium on publishing papers by scientists and scholars in countries under U.S. trade embargoes. "Chemical Society Lifts Moratorium on Publishing Papers From Embargoed Countries," by Lila Gutterman, Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 February 2004. Please note a subscriber password is needed to view this article.

Rep. Berman's (D-CA) letter opposing OFAC's attempted regulation of articles written by those in embargoed countries.

Report on OFAC/IEEE meeting by Mary Case, Director, Office of Scholarly Communication.

OFAC gives IEEE permission to edit manuscripts from U.S.-embargoed countries. NY Times article 4/5/04

IEEE issues press release in response to OFAC's letter 4/5/04