1030 



U.S. PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL S&T COOPERATION 17 



The United States, for example, may intervene actively in private in- 

 ternational agreements in cases involving (1) national security consid- 

 erations, (2) antitrust considerations, or (3) questions of national in- 

 dustrial policy (e.g., protection or promotion of a failing industry). ^^ 

 Yet, despite the problems of control inherent in such private coopera- 

 tion, a future increase in industrial contacts may reduce the need to 

 build additional international S&T infrastructure at public expense. 



Individual Cooperation 



In the final analysis, the most basic and enduring channel of inter- 

 national S&T cooperation remains at the level of the individual scien- 

 tist or engineer. There is a rich sociological literature on the so-called 

 "invisible colleges" of science^'' that function informally through cor- 

 respondence, telecommunications, and personal contacts and visits. 

 Most would agree that this is the very lifeblood of scientific progress. 

 On a more formal level, individual S&T cooperation takes place 

 chiefly through short- or long-term academic exchanges and fellow- 

 ships, student-teacher relationships, attendance at international con- 

 ferences and meetings, joint authorship of scientific literature, and 

 collaborative research projects. Data monitored by the NSF indicate a 

 decline since the mid-1970s in U.S. foreign participation in interna- 

 tional meetings and U.S. postdoctoral study abroad, and only very 

 modest increases in the authorship levels of U.S. international cooper- 

 ative research in the period between 1973 and 1980. (In fact, the 

 United States and Japan continue to maintain the lowest levels of coop- 

 erative international authorship among the major OECD countries. )'^'^ 



These trends may be explained in part by the increased costs of for- 

 eign travel at a time when travel budgets are no longer growing. For 

 example, due to inflation and rising costs, most of the Fulbright 

 awards made to U.S. scholars working in Western Europe in recent 

 years have been only partial grants for periods of less than 9 months. 

 In academic year 1982-1983, only 38 percent of the awards were for 

 the full academic year; of this group, only 38 percent were fully 

 funded. However, Fulbright scholars in scientific disciplines, who re- 

 ceived 34 percent of the research awards made from 1978 to 1982, 

 have been somewhat more successful than those in the humanities or 

 social sciences in identifying supplemental sources of support. ^^ 



U.S. postdoctoral fellows cite a number of additional factors for not 

 considering further study outside the United States; these are listed in 

 Table 3. Among the most frequently mentioned are the inadequacy of 

 funding, poor support by the hosts, and language problems. The lack 



