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This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.

The Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) is the Flemish research and knowledge centre for nature and its sustainable management and use. The INBO conducts research and supplies knowledge to all those who prepare or make the policies or are interested in them. As a leading scientific institute, the INBO works for the Flemish government primarily, but also supplies information for international reporting and deals with questions from local authorities. In support of this research the INBO collects and manages a wealth of biodiversity data, mainly species observation records: the what, when and where of a species. One of our strategic aims is to make this research data publicly available. Our journey to opening our data started in 2010 with the publication of our first datasets on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a network who strives for free and open access to biodiversity data. In the years since, we have become one of the major publishers and promoters of biodiversity data - with over 5 million species observation records, as well as geographical and other research data - and got involved in open data movement. It is within this context that the organization started to evolve towards an open data research institute. Recently we signed theBouchout declaration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management and approved, as one of the first Flemish institutes, our open data policy. During this presentation we will talk about the barriers, highlights and setbacks we encountered during this journey.

Sets forth the operations of the Institute since its beginning Oct. 1, 1916.

The Institute for Government Research is an institution incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia and wholly supported by voluntary private donations. It received its charter on March 13, 1916, and began active operations on October 1 of the same year. Its purpose as set forth in its charter is:"To conduct scientific investigations into the theory and practice of governmental administration, including inquiries into the form of organization and the manner of operation of federal, state and local governmental bodies and offices in the United States of America; the powers, duties, limitations and qualifications of officers; the methods of administration employed; the character and cost of results obtained and the conditions affecting the efficiency and welfare of governmental officers and employees; to carry on such inquiries, directly or with the coöperation of governments, learned societies, institutions of learning or other agencies and individuals and to make public the results of its investigations; to maintain a library for the use of the society or its members and officers and those affiliated with its work; and to prosecute such other inquiries and perform such other services as may tend to the development and application of the principles of efficiency in governmental administration."

A fierce debate ensued after the announcement in 1913 in the U.S.A. that all rights and ownership of radium-bearing ores found on public land would be reserved by the government. At stake was the State monopolization of radium that pitted powerful industrialists with radium claims, mainly in the Colorado area, against the Bureau of Mines and prestigious physicians who wished to reserve radium for medical uses. This article describes the strategies of one of the biggest U.S. radium industries that dominated the radium market, created huge customer bases, and legitimized their role within the scientific community. In contrast to the European ""radium situation,"" radium extraction, production, and marketing in the United States was controlled by the industry; and industrial in-house research was clearly separate from that done in academic circles. The production of knowledge was ready-made in the factory and was entangled with commercial orders and advertising patterns. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

American Institute for Economic Research

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a new sub-field of physics and chemistry emerged centering on radioactivity. Its disciplinary structures were slow to crystallize. The early phase of this field was characterized by substantial international exchange between the European centers in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Cambridge and a concomitant high degree of transdisciplinarity. Research on radioactivity was also marked by an unusual openness in respect to gender and gender politics. The volatile political and social context of nuclear research, which abruptly changed several times, acted to further, impede or block these initiatives to transcend diverse boundaries in science, politics, and society. The two central questions of the present project are: How did the agendas and foci of Austrian nuclear research, and the styles of work of the scientists, change within the framework of international cooperation and competition? How were these developments dynamically linked with the political, social and cultural shifts in European history in the 20th century?
The historical analysis starts with the founding of the Vienna Institute for Radium Research (IRR), including the institutes for physics at the University of Vienna that worked in close cooperation with the IRR. The period under investigation extends from the late years of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to World War I, the era of "Red Vienna," the "state of estates" (Ständestaat) and the Nazi dictatorship, down to the full restoration of Austrian sovereignty in 1955. The study will include systematic transnational comparisons with the other centers of European nuclear research, based in part on existing literature from the history of science, as well as exact reconstructions of the bilateral and multilateral cooperative links and relations with the international scientific community. In this way, the proposed project is expected to go beyond the historical reconstruction of nuclear research in Austria and shed light on the importance of nationality and internationality, both for framing politics and as mental and cultural points of reference for the behavior and actions of the scientific actors and the production of scientific knowledge under shifting constellations of war and peace, democracy and dictatorship. - Wie veränderte sich die Radioaktivitäts- und Kernforschung in Österreich seit der Entdeckung des Kernzerfalls im späten 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges? Dieses Buch bietet eine profunde Analyse lokaler Forschungstraditionen im politisch-sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Kontext. Die Studie verortet das Institut für Radiumforschung in Wien und andere österreichische Standorte der Radioaktivitäts- bzw. Kernforschung in zwei sich überlagernden Netzwerken: Einerseits im regionalen Forschungsraum der Habsburger Monarchie, der Ersten Republik und des "Dritten Reiches" und andererseits in der globalen Gemeinschaft der "Radioaktivisten". Sie zeigt anhand neuer Archivquellen, welche Rolle die in Österreich vorhandenen Ressourcen im globalen Netzwerk der Kernforschung spielten.

What could it mean to be a physicist specialized in radioactivity in the early 20th century Vienna? More specifically, what could it mean to be a woman experimenter in radioactivity during that time? This dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of the women experimenters of the Institut fr Radiumforschung in Vienna between 1910 and 1938. As one of three leading European Institutes specializing in radioactivity, the Institute had a very strong staff. At a time when there were few women in physics, one third of the Institute's researchers were women. Furthermore, they were not just technicians but were independent researchers who published at about the same rate as their male colleagues. This study accounts for the exceptional constellation of factors that contributed to the unique position of women in Vienna as active experimenters. Three main threads structure this study. One is the role of the civic culture of Vienna and the spatial arrangements specific to the Mediziner-Viertel in establishing the context of the intellectual work of the physicists. A second concerns the ways the Institute's architecture helped to define the scientific activity in its laboratories and to establish the gendered identities of the physicists it housed. The third examines how the social conditions of the Institute influenced the deployment of instrumentation and experimental procedures especially during the Cambridge-Vienna controversy of the 1920s. These threads are unified by their relation to the changing political context during the three contrasting periods in which the story unfolds: a) from the end of the 19th century to the end of the First World War, when new movements, including feminism, Social Democracy, and Christian Socialism, shaped the Viennese political scene, b) the period of Red Vienna, 1919 to 1934, when Social Democrats had control of the City of Vienna, and c) the period from 1934 to the Anschluss in 1938, during which fascists and Nazis seized power in Austria. As I show, the careers of the Institute's women were shaped in good part by the shifting meanings, and the politics, that attached to being a "woman experimenter" in Vienna from 1910 to the beginning of the Second World War. ; Ph. D.