

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access - teoruiz
http://royalsociety.org/news/Royal-Society-journal-archive-made-permanently-free-to-access/

======
_delirium
The press release naturally doesn't mention it, but I'd guess this was done at
least in part because the release of the back issues for free public access
became a _fait accompli_ with: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709>

People have been pressuring them for years to make these open-access, arguing
that a non-profit society dedicated to spreading public knowledge ought to at
least make the very old historical articles freely available to the general
public.

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tokenadult
Benjamin Franklin's 1752 paper on experimenting with electricity from
thunderstorms, collected in a Leyden jar, is not to be missed.

[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/47/565.full.p...](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/47/565.full.pdf)

After edit:

To answer a question raised by another HN user, the Wikipedia article on the
medial s character in older printed English-language books

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s>

is helpful about the history of printing that character.

~~~
vibragiel
"Make a small cross, of two light strips of cedar; the arms so long, as to
reach the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief, when extended: tie
the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross; so you have
the body of a kite..."

Love it.

Also, the first paper by Newton, on his new theory about light and colour. He
was still just a "Mr."!

[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/69-80/3075....](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/69-80/3075.full.pdf+html?sid=0d477dd8-8dec-4ac3-8187-b6df96d4d670)

~~~
mikedmiked
A Professor before becoming a Dr... Those were the days...

~~~
hugh3
There are plenty of professors out there without PhDs, even nowadays.

Not at Cambridge, and not in Physics, but they exist.

~~~
felipemnoa
In my school at least, they were not called professors if they did not have a
PhD, just lecturers.

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Dn_Ab
I cannot adequately express how awesome having access to this information is
to me. When I was younger I would read one biography from <http://www.gap-
system.org/~history/> before going to bed. It is nothing short of amazing to
be able to get a projection, a snapshot of the workings of the great minds of
centuries past. To see them struggle and then brilliantly succeed in
explaining concepts that were at the edge of knowledge, that are still non-
trivial and have their work remain timeless by continuing to stand head and
shoulders above modern treatments of the same subject is remarkable.

I did a search on a bunch of people - Hamilton, Euler, George Green,
Bernoulli, Euler, Gauss, Clifford, Boole and more. As is to be expected not
every one is there. The most interesting essays my short search found were:

A Mathematical Theory of Magnetism by William Thomson
[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/141/243.full....](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/141/243.full.pdf+html?sid=fe65c826-aad8-409c-89d5-cd8378f605c6)

and An Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances by Thomas
Bayes.
[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/53/370.full.p...](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/53/370.full.pdf+html?sid=5a73db2e-6635-4240-a252-e54cc481c83f)

------
euroclydon
The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson, has a highly entertaining historical
fiction treatment of the Royal Society, Newton and other main characters.

~~~
xefer
The grotesque experiment on the dog by Hooke described in the book is outlined
here:

<http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/23-32/539>

The Royal Society had open up their complete archives a few years ago for a
period and I fished this out then.

~~~
vibragiel
I saw the paper referenced at the Trailblazing website. It's a nice visual way
of exploring some of the most notable papers from the Royal Society.

<http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/>

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retrovirus
It's good to see hardcore academic institutions like the Royal Society move
towards opening knowledge for the public.

~~~
twstws
I suppose, but they are only opening articles that are 70 years old. Which
means curiosities like Darwin's geology papers are now available, but you
still need to pay for anything remotely current. So it's a nice start, but
unlikely to effect their bottom line, or make doing science any easier for
anyone outside the first world academy.

~~~
retrovirus
Yes, you're right. But it's still a step in the right direction and hopefully
others will follow suit. And I am really optimistic, looking at the uber-cool
initiatives of the Khan Academy (<http://www.khanacademy.org/>), MIT's
OpenCourseWare (<http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm>), Stanford's OpenClassroom
(<http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/HomePage.php>) and their latest
online courses in Machine learning (<http://ml-class.org>), Artificial
Intelligence (<http://ai-class.com>), and Databases (<http://db-class.org>).

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tsycho
Anyone knows why most of the "s" characters have become "f"? eg: beft,
fucceeded etc.

Interestingly, nothing else seems to be wrong (at least I didn't spot anything
else). And it's not even consistent, eg: crofs (instead of cross, so only one
's' became 'f' here).

~~~
ig1
OCR software tends to have problem with the ligatures used for "s" in old
fonts so often transcribes them as "f".

More expensive OCR software tends to get around this by using probability
models to guess the correct word (i.e. "best" is much more likely than
"beft"), but I'm guessing they're using some mid-range OCR package.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Seriously? Did you even look at the pages in question?

They are reproductions of the originals, and maintain the original fonts and
orthography. This includes the long s, as well as certain ligatures (like ct),
and has absolutely nothing to do with their choice of OCR software. In fact,
there's no indication that OCR software was used at all.

~~~
ig1
The indexing seems based on OCR, for example try the keyword search
"Tranfactions"

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yannis
You got to love some of these papers.

Account of an Elephant's Tusk, in which the Iron Head of a Spear was found
imbedded. By Mr. Charles Combe, of Exeter College, Oxford, 1801.

Coming up with research topics was always an art!

------
Jun8
These are gold!

Obligatory Isaac Newton search reveals his biting answer to "some
considerations upon his doctrine of light and colors":
[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/81-91/5084....](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/81-91/5084.full.pdf+html?sid=0bd4bec0-7c12-4aa2-aa18-88ee41085e43)
(note spelling of "color"). The initial phrase sets the tone: "Sir, I have
already told you ..."

Too bad scientific papers have lost this rhetorical flavor.

