The decades around 1900 witnessed an unprecedented integration of global communication systems for the sciences. This paper gives a brief overview of the changes that made this possible. The key technologies involved new ways of circulating paper. Imports of wood-based paper from the forests of Northern Europe, Australia and Canada brought cheap newspapers within the reach of new audiences in urban centres throughout the world. International standardisation of postal rates through the Universal Postal Union (f. 1874) made correspondence far more straightforward than it had been before. At the same time, the establishment of extensive systems of translations between the international languages of learning—French, German and English—meant that works in any one of these languages typically became widely available to specialists in many different countires. These international systems, many of them developed for managing colonial empires and networks of trade, were tied to a public science focussed on debates about Darwinism, atomic theory and other synthetic systems, and to laboratory and field work concentrated on issues of standards, hierarchy and distribution.