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Government Revises Position on Publishing
By Jonathan Knight
The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC), in a July letter to newspaper editors, clarified the rules to be applied to articles or commentary submitted by authors from countries under U.S. sanction, including Cuba and Iran. OFAC is charged with administering trade sanctions imposed on countries judged to be national security threats by the president. Its regulations affect certain aspects of editing manuscripts submitted by authors from sanctioned countries. A group of organizations of writers, First Amendment advocates, and scholars, including the AAUP, last spring criticized OFAC's rules as unclear and suggested that OFAC overstepped its bounds in seeking to regulate scholarship. (See "Government Scrutinizes Scholarly Publishing" on pages 5-6 of the September-October issue.) OFAC will now exempt from the government's regulations the translation of a work in its entirety, changes to a work to make it conform to the newspaper's editorial standards, and changes to make the work more understandable to the newspaper's readers. Still unresolved is OFAC's claim that it can determine what kinds of editorial services by other groups are allowed. Several organizations have filed suit challenging OFAC's authority to make such decisions.
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