ABSTRACT
Can intervention or interference by the federal government result in research misconduct? Embargoes enforced against other nations have caused some scienti c controversy. For example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Of ce of Foreign Affairs Control (OFAC) has caused the delay or prevention of some publications in recent years. Furthermore, the American Chemical Society (ACS) and other American publishers have been prohibited from providing comments via the peer-review process or any other editorial services to authors from Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan in the past. The OFAC ruling further stated that manuscripts accepted by a journal may only be reproduced in exactly the form that they are received. Let us be clear about what that says: It says that a journal, if it is going to accept a publication from an Iranian scientist, must accept it with any and all typographical errors and in the layout (which is different from the nal, print layout) it is received in. This ruling included peer-review activities that would provide scienti c feedback as well. This was eventually ignored by at least the Journal of Organic Chemistry, as indicated in a published editorial, while the ACS worked to get the ruling overturned. In late 2004, the regulations were eased after a lawsuit. In essence, the federal government has tried to dictate to an independent publisher how and what to publish. This can absolutely be argued to be a usurpation of constitutional rights. However, a counterargument that constitutional rights are extended to individuals and not organizations is certainly one that is logical. That being said, an environment where federal law inhibits the progress of science by forbidding productive communication between researchers is somewhat akin to the Dark Ages when the Catholic Church sti†ed science.
