The world's largest technical professional association has restored most of the free services it withdrew from members living in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan nearly 3 years ago out of concern that continuing to provide them might violate US trade embargoes against those countries.
In January 2002, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) took away the rights of embargoed country members to use @IEEE E-mail addresses, to be promoted to senior membership status, to renew their memberships and order IEEE journals online, to access the organization's online database, and to organize IEEE-affiliated student chapters.
Those actions and restrictions the organization voluntarily adopted on editing journal manuscripts from embargoed country authors raised a storm of protests from its members. More than 5000 people worldwide signed a petition protesting the actions, and many Iranian members quit.
Last week (October 12), IEEE announced on its Web site that it had restored all...
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