A comma here, an m-dash there
commons-blog has reported on the lifting of the ban on editing submissions to U.S. publishers from authors in countries under trade embargoes by the U.S., such as Cuba, Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Rick wonders if the powers that are got an attack of old-time civil religion, and that's why the Treasury Department redacted their interpretation of a 16-year old exemption. I have a much more cynical view of why the ban has been dropped, though unsupported by any evidence. Basically, I think it was a combination of pressure from:
* commerce -- The Chronicle referred to 2 or 3 different non-profit scholarly publishers, but didn't mention any of the commercial ones (such as Reed-Elsevier). I don't know how much lobbying power IEEE has in DC, but I would guess that the commercial publishers (who are very much into harmonization of markets, after all) have a few orders of magnitude more. Also, a long-term ban on American scholarly publishing could have led to a brain drain towards European scholarly publishers who would have no such restrictions;
* intelligence -- for decades, the U.S. intelligence establishment claimed that hostile (Soviet) interests kept track of our STM and Gov Doc publishing in order to reverse-engineering sensitive data from unclassified material (this was the FBI's defense of the Library Awareness Program). Surely it's not that much of a stretch to assume that "we" do the same. Shutting out material from hostile countries would discourage those governments from letting their scientists publish outside of the country and would simply lead to a small information pool from which to data-mine. Besides which, even if the top scientists are not the ones submitting articles, the people who are may turn out to be the most sympathetic/least ideological, and thus the softest targets for 'asset management'.
What can I say? I finally got around to reading Surveillance in the Stacks.
This is just a comment on Rick's comment, btw, that was simply way too big for his comments section. For actual information, he has some solid links up for your perusal.