Ch. 10— Information Resources and Computer Systems • 223 
International Barriers to 
Sharing Information 
Animal research and testing is conducted in 
many countries (as described in ch.16). The im- 
portance of communicating scientific information 
among nations has been recognized in the United 
Nations, in the Organization for Economic Coop- 
eration and Development (OECD), and in regional 
and bilateral forums. Although much has been 
done to facilitate this, many barriers must still be 
overcome. 
International communications cost more and 
take longer than domestic communications. More- 
over, there are fewer international personal ac- 
quaintances on whom to rely for information than 
there are on a national level. Communication prob- 
lems are exacerbated by institutional differences . 
It is difficult for industry -to-industry communi- 
cations to occur, for example, when one industry 
is privately owned and another is government- 
owned, because governments typically deal 
through diplomatic channels. 
Political animosities hinder information ex- 
change. Defense -related information is affected 
the most, but all information sharing must suffer 
in such a climate. Even political differences cause 
problems in sharing information. It is difficult for 
agencies within the U .S . Government to obtain in- 
formation from governments that have close work- 
ing relationships with their industries, such as Ja- 
pan, particularly when any information received 
would be subject to Freedom of Information Act 
requests in the United States. 
Language differences are a large problem, both 
in the use of written materials and in personal com- 
munications. Translation and interpreting are ex- 
pensive, particularly in the United States, where 
the number of people who speak more than one 
language has been decreasing. English translation 
costs for the four principal languages of science 
(French, German, Russian, and Japanese) range 
from $40 to $88 per thousand words . An estimated 
$4 billion to $5 billion would be required to trans- 
late the current foreign-language holdings of the 
National Library of Medicine (NLM), for example, 
with an ongoing yearly translation cost of $150 
million (9). Duplicative translations are avoided 
through the clearinghouse effort of the John 
Crerar Library in Chicago, IL. Translations donated 
by a variety of sources on a broad spectrum of 
topics are made available to others. 
Common protocols can also facilitate the inter- 
national exchange of, for example, testing data. 
OECD members decided in 1981 that health -effects 
data generated according to OECD test guidelines 
should be mutually acceptable in all member coun- 
tries, regardless of where the testing was done (see 
app. A) (17). Although this decision has not been 
fully implemented, OECD test guidelines are readily 
available and are receiving considerable use. 
RETRIEVING RESEARCH AND TESTING DATA 
The ways data are obtained and the amount 
sought are functions of the resources available for 
searching, how the data are to be used, the likeli- 
hood that the information exists at all, and how 
reliable the information is likely to be. Many meth- 
ods for finding information are available, and most 
of them overlap to some extent. 
Abstracting and Citation Services 
In research and testing, several hundred thou- 
sand scientific articles in thousands of journals are 
published each year in the primary literature (6). 
Abstracting and indexing services and biblio- 
graphic services play a vital role in making these 
accessible to those who need them . (An index based 
on references cited, or citations, permits the user 
to follow the literature into the future to locate 
pertinent articles. For example, a user with a 1981 
article in hand who is seeking related, more re- 
cent publications can consult a citation index to 
identify 1985 publications that referenced the 1981 
article.) Because animals are used for a variety of 
research purposes (see chs. 5 and 6), however, and 
because testing is interdisciplinary (see chs. 7 and 
8), information may be indexed in the fields of 
chemistry, biology, pharmacology, medicine, and 
so on. 
