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The article presents the author's comparison of the patterns of publicity, privacy, and secrecy between the U.S. and Great Britain. In Great Britain, the equilibrium of publicity, privacy, and secrecy is more stable, and its deviations from the normal state are smaller than they are in the U.S. The British governmental papers which are not published at the time as part of government policy, are opened to scholarly inspection only after a very long lapse of time and even then with restrictions. On the other hand, in the U.S., government documents are made available to historians without long delay.

Using a variety of indicators, such as the number of scientists, number of journals, or number of professional associations, the growth of modern science has been exponential, doubling with regularity through various time intervals, and resulting in a population of scientists about eighty to ninety per cent of all scientists who ever lived. The second condition includes the division of science into disciplines, the growth of research specialties, and the further emergence of research problem areas which have all contributed to the fragmentation of specialized knowledge. This paper presents the results of an investigation of one national communication system in a research speciality: the high energy physics community in Great Britain. The focus of the paper is on four questions about the communication system. First, which methods of communication are important to individual scientists and why are they important? Second, what are the social scientific characteristics of scientists who participate in the informal communication system? Third, how best can the organization of the informal communication system be characterized? Fourth what is the relationship between the communication and the reward systems?

The article focuses on listener research in broadcasting in Great Britain. A gap exists in this country between the transmitting and the listening ends of the broadcasting process. Contact with listeners are more developed in Britain than in France, and as developed as in Sweden and Norway. But in comparison with the U.S. the amount of enquiry and research is small. The reason for this disparity is the incentives supplied by the American Broadcasting Corp. to broadcasting companies which supply programmes, to discover the tastes potential and habits of their clients. For regular contact with listeners, and with public opinion the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) relies upon four things. These are advisory councils and their officers, Press relations, publications and programme correspondence. Advisory councils in relation to religion and music exist to provide contact not with listeners, but with religious and musical authorities. Press relations have been ably handled at BBC. But contacts with the press have concentrated mainly on the building up of goodwill and have been concerned relatively little with providing grist for programme-makers' mills. Three BBC journals provide a certain outlet for public opinion through their correspondence columns. The remaining source of information is correspondence through letters.