This event generated a wave of intense competition in science and technology in the industrialized nations, but one of the rationales offered publicly to Western politicians at the time was that the Soviets had leapt ahead in the space race because they had a more unified and orderly approach to the organization and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
[4] As the United States mobilized to create a new information infrastructure for the promotion of scientific innovation, G. Miles Conrad, Director of Biological Abstracts (now BIOSIS, part of the Thomson Reuters corporation), called an urgent meeting of fourteen leading not-for-profit and government scientific abstracting and indexing (A&I) services.
Such services play a major role in managing the flow of scientific and scholarly communication and have done so since 1665 with the launch of Journal des Scavans.
[5] The attending representatives agreed to a model for information dissemination that drew upon the strengths of both scholarly associations of scientists and researchers and government agencies.
In 1958, convinced of the value of mutual interaction and the interchange of ideas and expertise, a new organization–the National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFSAIS)–was formed.