ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Scientific Information for Peace or Progress?

• In Event: The Local and the Global in Scientific Information

English Abstract

The open access movement in the 1990s maintains that scientific publications should be accessible and reusable without paywalls. A strong argument is the need to share and disseminate new discoveries and findings for scientific progress and technological innovation effectively and efficiently. The contemporary movement has been driven by the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web, at a time when commercial publishers had dominated the market of academic publications. On a closer look, however, the idea of open access existed before the Internet. Between the interwar years and the 1960s, there were numerous initiatives to construct central repositories and to organise scientific publications internationally, with the objectives of facilitating the dissemination of scientific information within and across borders. The establishment of the American Documentation Institute in the United States, the Association for Special Libraries and Information Bureaux in Great Britain, and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (a precursor of UNESCO) are examples of great effort in innovative methods to organize scientific information and exploring emerging technologies such as microfilm. Yet, their mission was not only to make scientific information accessible—it was also believed that scientific cooperation is a necessity to sustain world peace. In this short presentation, I will discuss the peaceful ideal of documentation and information science and speculate why the dream of open access faded into oblivion in the world of documentation of scientific information in the late 1960s.

Author

• Lai Ma, University College Dublin