President's page: The AGU and scientific communication

Most of us can remember when it first became evident that we were producing, and in turn being deluged by, the present flood of increased scientific information. For a time it was popular to speak of the information explosion. The flood of paper has now been with us long enough to make comments about the information explosion more trite than funny. We then spoke seriously of the problems of information retrieval, when it was realized that finding existing information might be as difficult as producing new knowledge. No doubt in some instances it was more feasible to discover something again than to exhaust all avenues of search for assurance that answers did not already exist. These are problems of scientific communication, which is one of the most frustrating and burdensome of our unsolved problems. Many good minds and many dollars have been applied in search for solutions. Perhaps the problem has been solved tolerably in some fields, but most of us feel that we are about to go under for the third time.