WANA (Sep 12) – Iranian Deputy Health Minister for Research and Technology Shahin Akhondzadeh has criticized restrictions imposed on Iranian users of a scientific publishing platform, saying that U.S. sanctions were affecting scientific communications.

 

In a post, Akhondzadeh said that the restrictions went beyond scientific sanctions and amounted to scientific warfare.

 

He said that he had prepared a paper for the journal Neuropsychobiology and had encountered the restriction as soon as he began the submission process. He said the page indicated that Iranian users and users from several other countries could not submit articles to the journal through the dashboard because of sanctions.

 

The screenshot shared by Akhondzadeh shows a message from Salesforce stating that, in order to comply with U.S. export-control and economic-sanctions laws and regulations, the company does not support users accessing its applications from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, the regions of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine, and Belarus.

 

The message also states that the restrictions apply even when a user is temporarily traveling in one of the listed countries or regions.

 

Criticizing the restrictions, Akhondzadeh said that the situation demonstrated what he described as the American concept of a free scientific world and the separation of science from politics.