Abbas Ali Saberi calls for an end to sanctions that are hurting physics and physicists in Iran
“As a result of sanctions, we regret that unfortunately we are unable to handle your submission to this journal”. I imagine not many of you have ever encountered this message after sending one of your papers to a journal, but it has now become all too familiar for researchers in Iran. That is because since the start of 2013, the US has asked scientific publishers to help tighten trade sanctions on Iran. Most journals therefore are not dealing with manuscripts written by Iranian scientists, meaning rejection even before peer review.
Although some of the sanctions have recently being eased, this has had no effective impact on research yet. Two of my colleagues in the physics department at the University of Tehran, for example, who work in optical physics, have recently submitted their research papers to an established European journal. They are still waiting for a proper response. The editors claim that they cannot find a referee to evaluate their work, with some referees apparently even refusing to review the paper as the authors are Iranian. Yet while papers from Iran are being turned away, many Iranian researchers are still acting as journal editors and referees.
Even simple misinterpretations and misconceptions of the sanctions can be just as damaging. Companies sometimes extend the sanctions to where they are not actually applicable in order to avoid any sort of punishment in dealing with Iran. This means, for example, that experimental physicists in Iran are unable to equip their labs even with the simplest instruments and tools, given that the sanctions do not allow overseas companies to do business here.
Yet the sanctions are just one of many unpleasant obstacles facing the physics community – another is visa restrictions. International collaboration plays a crucial role in the growth of any scientific community, and Iran’s is no exception. But Iranian researchers face serious problems in obtaining visas for academic visits to other countries. Recent unnecessary measures adopted by foreign embassies in Iran in issuing visas for Iranian scientists, especially to physicists, have limited our contribution and participation in various scientific events, even those with aims that have nothing to do with technology or nuclear science.
In 2007, for example, I was supposed to participate in a workshop and summer school on statistical physics and conformal field theory in Melbourne, Australia, together with two colleagues from Sharif University of Technology. Unfortunately, we could not attend the school since the Australian embassy did not issue our visa. The only reason I can think of for the refusal was that we were physicists. Then in July last year I was expected to start a two-year Humboldt fellowship at the University of Cologne in Germany, but nearly a year later and I am still waiting for the German embassy in Tehran to issue the visa. Yet it will not be my first trip to the country as I had already been a postdoc at Cologne for a year in 2011 and spent another three months as a visitor there in 2012.
Are these restrictions not against the fundamental principles that scientists adhere to?
Even when researchers are granted a visa, the situation can be just as difficult. For Iranian physicists working and studying in the US, their visas are “single entry”, meaning they are forced to stay in the country for long periods – sometimes up to four or five years – without being able to visit their families or play an active role in promoting the physics community in Iran. In some cases, Iranian students who are attending a conference or workshop in the US or Europe are not even allowed to visit nearby laboratories or take part in specific activities and tutorial courses. Are these restrictions not against the fundamental principles of scientific and intellectual values that scientists adhere to?
Bouncing back
Despite all these pressures and constraints, the Iranian physics community has made substantial progress in research in the last couple of years, particularly in terms of the quality of papers published. According to Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science database, by the end of 2013, almost 29,000 papers in physics had been published in total by Iranian physicists, including some papers with several hundred citations and 70 papers with more than 100 citations each. From those 29,000 papers, more than 12,000 papers have been published between 2011 and 2013. This signals that Iranian science has a growing impact in physics.
Education, also, has improved. Women make up about 60% of the total number of undergraduate students in physics, filling 35% of PhD positions in various fields of research in physics. For the last two years, women have also made up around 60% of the participants at the Annual Physics Conference of Iran and currently women form 51% of the 10,000 or so members of the Iranian Physical Society. Taking all these facts into account, it seems obvious that imposing sanctions on science – apart from being an unprecedented action in the history of science – has not yet had a significant impact on Iran’s scientific progress but that is unlikely to remain the case.
I now urge scientific journals to stop their non-scientific policies regarding Iranian scientists and let science evolve as it should. We need to end these sanctions that do not allow our scientists to travel and I urge governments to reconsider their policies in order to facilitate and expedite their visa process for Iranian scientists and to offer more visas for our scientists. I hope that everyone realizes that these sanctions are damaging the capability and the future of Iranian research and I call on you to help with our cause.
