Back in the 1960s, the Internet was developed as a tool for scientists to share high performance computing resources. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee (“Father of the Web”) began his work on Web documents and servers to help physicists at CERN share their research.

This paper’s finding that scientists are increasingly disseminating products of research (databases, software etc) via the Web, is not then a great surprise. The Web has made the life-blood of scientific work—sharing—easier and more visible. The author searched the natural sciences, engineering and medical research publication database (SCISEARCH) over the ten year period 1988-1998, extracting and analyzing records containing “http” (“http” being a strong indicator of a Web address). It is not clear why 1988 was taken as a starting point, as the Web only became widely used in 1993.

The paper gives some data on the types of resource being shared (mostly databases and software), the disciplines most active in the use of the Web (life sciences and medicine), and the importance of intellectual property rights and copyright issues to scientists who are using the Web (most scientists appear unconcerned and want to freely share their results).

This paper might motivate scientists to explore the rich sets of online resources. A geographer or a social scientist reading the paper might be encouraged to add to the apparently sparse material currently being shared in those fields.

Perhaps the biggest contribution the paper makes, though, is to act as a snapshot of early Web use and dissemination attitudes. It will be interesting to contrast this picture with the situation in ten or twenty years time, when the technologies and use of the Web have become much more pervasive and sophisticated.

Review by:  Matt Jones