A US government agency better known for seizing the assets of dope smugglers has become an arbiter of scientific publishing. Bowing to pressure from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a branch of the US Treasury Department, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) on 12 January stopped accepting papers submitted to its 11 journals from Sudan, Libya, Iran and Cuba.

The OFAC monitors and enforces the US trade embargo against the countries. The federal regulations that define the terms of the embargo specifically exempt journal articles and other forms of communication, but only if they are finished works.

According to R. Richard Newcomb, director of the OFAC, reviewing and editing are considered “services,” which are prohibited if an author, editor or reviewer is affiliated with an embargoed country. A manuscript submitted in camera-ready form is legal, but if edited by the recipient—even if the changes go no further than copy-editing—it is not. Scientific manuscripts are typically passed back and forth between author, editor and reviewer, with changes occurring at each transit, until a final version is hammered out.

The OFAC provides a licensing mechanism allowing editors to apply for permission to publish, but the process is cumbersome and time consuming. In one case, it took 10 months for the agency to respond to a license request for a paper from Iran.

Following a letter from the OFAC in September 2003, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has chosen to reject all but camera-ready manuscripts from the embargoed countries. The American Chemical Society also no longer accepts submissions from those countries.

Sam Kaplan, chair of the publications board of the ASM, says his society will apply for OFAC licenses, and will try to initiate legislation to exempt scientific exchange entirely. For the time being, however, the ASM reluctantly refuses submissions from the four countries.

“We are deeply distressed to take this action, but we cannot place our staff or volunteers in a position of jeopardy,” Kaplan says. “We sincerely hope that knowledgeable people will appreciate the harm that this does to the scientific enterprise.”

Other editors are also unhappy with the policy. “It's open discrimination not only against research but against people from certain countries,” says Keith Yamamoto, editor of Molecular Biology of the Cell. “First Amendment issues aside, it smacks of ethnicism and doesn't have anything to do with science per se. I find it wildly inappropriate and embarrassing.”

Yamamoto, who is a member of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy, a consortium of five learned societies that interfaces with members of Congress, says he will urge the group to oppose the OFAC licensing scheme. “For our government to be taking a stand against open scientific communication is very troubling,” he says.