The text included in some of the graphics files within this report may be difficult to read from your browser. Should you encounter difficulties, please view the graphics file separately by clicking on the image. The industrial nations have made large investments in international scientific collaboration. The advent of telecommunications as a means to facilitate scientific collaborations promises to greatly increase their productivity. But we do not know how this development will alter patterns of research or where the benefits will flow.
Most scientists pay little heed to the organizations which both shape and sustain their activities.
The advent of new technologies such as the Web and the Internet, have become integral tools for many scientists and have transformed their workplace in ways that are both transparent and profoundly unsettling. The Internet has permitted us to vastly expand our interactive community but has made us aware that we are dependent upon a support structure that is both fragile and costly. We can no longer afford to ignore the organizing principles which constitute the interactive scientific infrastructure. Perhaps most disquieting is the prospect that a community's degree of access and use of the Internet threatens to stratify the international enterprise and isolate groups-most especially those with less resources and financial support. The purpose of this paper is to examine the threat to international scientific integrity posed by the mal allocation of resources and to catalog potential solutions to the problem of scientific fragmentation.