President' page: The AGU and its obligations as a scientific society to its members

Abstract

Scientific societies are the natural outgrowth of the needs of segments of the scientific community to exchange information on a broader base than that normally achieved through personal communication. They do not replace personal communication, but they do augment it by providing regular publication media and organized meetings. As long as the economics of publication, meetings, and attendant administrative costs remain reasonable, a society is viable. If the costs of providing such services are excessive in terms of the value rendered to the scientific community, a society is doomed. As the costs of administration, editing, and publishing do not change directly with volume of a given publication, there is a certain critical mass that must be achieved for a publication to be economically justified. Nearly every existing society has gone through a history of expanding publication to serve a constantly expanding membership, and in the case of the AGU, with a membership of diverse interests as represented by nine autonomous sections, the problem has been more acute than with other organizations. As long as the segments of the geophysical community represented by these sections were small, as they were prior to World War II, a single publication, the Transactions, and a single annual meeting, with a small administrative and editorial staff, served the needs of the members. Since World War II, with the impetus given to geophysics by the International Geophysical Year, the advent of artificial Earth satellites, Project Vela Uniform, and the formulation of various international programs such as International Years of the Quiet Sun, the International Indian Ocean Expedition, and the Upper Mantle Program, plus a growing concern in all aspects of hydrology, meteorology, and planetary science, the AGU has been hard pressed to meet the expanding requirements of its membership and has had to expand its publications, meetings, symposia, and special monographs. As interests are no longer along strictly disciplinary lines but in large measure are problem‐oriented and interdisciplinary in nature, it appears obvious that the sectional structure will also have to be modified.