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The 1961 International Congress of Biochemists in Moscow

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Attitudes of the not-for-profit organisations
Eugene Garfield Scientist
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There was an incredible anti-private enterprise sentiment. I mean, there were... these non-profits had their own way, everything they did, it was always holier than thou attitude that, you know, we can only do things right. That’s why the American Chemical Society never wanted to do everything, because they thought whatever they did, that was the gospel. So it even carried over, that's right... when I was at Oak Ridge I reminded them last week about the fact that the Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services, when it was set up it was purely for non-profits and the government; you could not be a member if you were... ISI could not be a member; Roy Hill [of McGraw-Hill] couldn’t and so on. That’s why we started, me, Boris Anžlovar, Jeff Norton, Bill Knox and Saul Herner were the five guys that founded the Information Industry Association. And not only that, that IIA has become SIIA, the Software and Information Industry Association. Today, of course, it has changed; ISI is a member of NFAIS and so on. But in the early days, the government would not give any kind of grant to us. If they gave anything it was a contract, they set the terms. And you know how often NSF tried to screw us out of our own data. Because Mort Malin had worked at NSF and he had negotiated some kind of a scholar's deal with them, and they used that, scholars were allowed to use our data for, you know, their own personal research, but they use that as a way to give the information to Francis Narin, give him the contract to do the work. That’s how it all happened, and it took us years to get out of that bind

Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.

Listeners: Henry Small

Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.

Duration: 2 minutes, 7 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2007

Date story went live: 23 June 2009