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Iranians struggling to secure free speech at home are facing a fresh set of restrictions from the US government. The US Department of the Treasury has ruled that editing or publishing scientific manuscripts from Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba violates the trade embargo on these countries. And US publishers and scientific societies are divided over how to respond. At a meeting in Washington on 9 February, David Mills, the treasury official in charge of implementing the policy, told representatives of 30 publishers that anyone wanting to publish papers from Iran should seek a licence from the treasury department. He also suggested that US scientists collaborating with Iranians could be prosecuted. The ruling has split US scientific societies. The journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have stopped accepting manuscripts from researchers in embargoed countries. On the other hand, the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, have so far refused to comply. “We feel that we are protected by freedom of speech,” says Marc Brodsky, executive director at the AIP. Questions about interactions with Iran first arose in 2001 when the IEEE tried to rent a conference room at a Tehran meeting, and was told that this would violate the US trade embargo. In ensuing conversations between the organization and the treasury department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, it emerged that publishing could also be restricted.According to a 30 September 2003 letter from the office,editing content from an news