J. Hearnshaw: A survey of published astronomical outputs of countries 1976-2005

I could not resist to return to the meeting anyway before I fly back to Sweden tonight. I was tempted by the Session about the "Virtual Observatory", but I guess one can find out about that on the web anyway.

Therefore, I am sitting in the Special Session 5 on "Astronomy for the Developing World" right now. I only got the last minutes of J. Heranshaws talk, but the summary contained the following:
- There are 1.39 astronomers per million population over the world.
- There are 9000 members in the IAU.
- The majority of papers is published by IAU members.
- 112 countries have no IAU members, but 3/4 of the world's population live in IAU member-countries.
- The GDP of a country correlates with the number of it's IAU members.
- It also correlates with the number of papers published.
- Since 2001, there has been a rapid increase in multi-national papers and large collaborations.