WASHINGTON: For US publishers, changing so much as a comma in an author's work can be more than a delicate process. It can be criminal - punishable by fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years.

In a move that pits national security concerns against academic freedom and the international flow of information, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations, the agency has ruled.

This week, one publisher decided to challenge the government - opting to risk criminal prosecution by editing articles submitted from the five embargoed nations: Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba.

"I decided that the risks of damaging our publishing programme now outweighed the risks of being in violation of the law," said Robert Bovenschulte, president of the American Chemical Society's publications division. The society publishes more than 24,000 articles each year in its various scientific journals, and 60 per cent are submitted from foreign nations, Bovenschulte said. It received 195 articles from Iranian scholars last year and published 60 of them.

"By not publishing articles coming from the five countries under trade embargo, we were, in effect, in violation of our own ethical guidelines that say that the basis for deciding what to publish is the quality of the science in the material and excludes the national origin of that material," Bovenschulte said. If the government decides to prosecute, he said, "I think we are going to be in good company."

Other publishers are choosing to follow the letter of the law.

"We are an ethical operation," said Michael Lightner, vice- president for publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. "We operate under the laws of the countries in which we do business." His journals will publish articles from embargoed countries in unedited form.

The different responses reflect the confusion and anxiety in academic circles over the government's new interpretation of the law. Some have denounced the Treasury policy, issued on Sept 30, as a violation of a 1988 legislative amendment that barred the president from restricting the flow of informational material from embargoed nations. Several groups have appealed to President Bush's science adviser.

Under the regulations, said Allan Adler, vice-president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, "if a publisher is trying to make a deal with an Iranian author about publication of a manuscript that is not completed, anything the publisher would do that would alter that manuscript would be prohibited and would require a licence from the Office of Foreign Assets Control." The result, said Adler, is a "chilling effect," on publishers.

In a statement issued on Friday in response to questions from the Los Angeles Times, Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, indicated unease with the regulations. Marburger said he supports "the use of economic sanctions against state sponsors of terrorism," but added, "I'm concerned about the impact interpretations of such sanctions may have on scientific publishing and, therefore, scientific openness. We are working on this issue and hope to achieve a satisfactory resolution."

While they wait for possible action, organizations are struggling to decide what to do.

Recently, the IEEE, which has some 360,000 members worldwide, opted to publish - unedited - articles submitted by authors in embargoed nations, and to apply for a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control that would allow them legally to edit the pieces.

Richard Newcomb, director of the office, said that request is being reviewed.

Newcomb said the office does not see its ruling as involving First Amendment rights or inhibiting academic exchanges. Rather, he said, the regulations are a technical interpretation of how Congress intended embargoes to be enforced against rogue states.

"This was a straight-up ruling," issued after the IEEE asked his office to interpret the law for them, said Newcomb. "They were taking in manuscripts and substantially doing things to them. These are fine people who wanted to get our opinion," and the office ruled that "we do have jurisdiction over this, it is not exempt (from the embargoes) it is something we can regulate."

But the notion that publishing articles does not inevitably involve editing them is mind-boggling to many in the business.

"We were really stunned to find out this was a legal issue," said Bovenschulte of the American Chemical Society. He said that his initial reaction was to impose a moratorium on articles submitted from embargoed nations. But this week the society instead decided to risk running afoul of the law.

That is a stance the engineers groups said it could not take. It was the IEEE that first raised the issue with the Treasury Department in 2001 after a bank refused to transfer money from the organization to a bank in Tehran, Iran, for an engineering conference.

Now, though the institute will accept papers from Iranian engineers and engineering students, it will not offer them for peer review or edit them - a decision that, in effect, meant they could not publish.

"Faculty members have to publish the results of their research to be known, to be promoted," said Fredun Hojabri, an Iranian-born chemist living in San Diego who is president of the Sharif University of Technology Association. "And there are more than 1,000 engineering graduate students who must publish the results of their research to graduate." -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.