Co‐operating for economy: international co‐ordination of information services

Scientific and technical information (STI) systems, in the wider sense of the term, have a long history of internationalism. The communication of research results has, from the earliest days, necessitated some form of international co‐ordination through, for example, learned societies and international publishing enterprises. However, it would be impracticable here to try to review the whole process of scientific communication, ranging from primary publication to alerting services and the like; instead, it is proposed to concentrate on a sample of secondary services for the creation of machine‐readable and printed versions of STI data bases on the one hand, and some of the more general aspects of the economics of use of such data bases on the other.