During a discussion about Open Access journal publishing Brian Whalley posed this "christmas quiz" question:
Who wrote the following and when?
"The kind of organization we wish to aim at is one where all relevant information should be available to each research worker and in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance. Further, that not only should the information be available, but that it should be to a large extent put at the disposal of the research worker without his having to take any special steps to get hold of it."
Google and Sheila Webber's interesting1 2003 Journal of Information Science article Information Science in 2003: A Critique led me to discover that this anticipation of the Web was by the UK-based Irish physicist JD Bernal, pictured above. In 1939.
1 Webber's categorisation of disciplines, building on Becher, as "Hard pure", " Soft pure", "Hard applied" and " Soft applied" caught my eye.
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