350 Years of Science Online

arkenian writes "The BBC reports that the Royal Society is putting all of its old papers online and has a fascinating sample of articles from the first several years. You can reach all the old journal articles from this page at the Royal Society by selecting a journal and going to past issues."

Comments

You mean they are reacting to...

[Anonymous Coward]

This :
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/3b85cac56a5810d4a24e13d79af58c48

?

Re:You mean they are reacting to...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

As an academic researcher beset by paywalls, I am downloading this entire collection at the earliest opportunity. As a professional, I need free and open access to knowledge in order to do my job effectively.

Content producers can argue about threats to their livelihoods. Well, this is about my livelihood; and moreover the ability of my society to improve itself through scientific and technological development. You can depreciate my agitation if you like, but I am not going to sit around wasting time waiting for the system to change on its own, and neither should society.

If the profit motive and existing copyright regime restricts access to information, then I see no difference between it and the censorship systems of the old Soviet Union and modern China. As such I see no reason to abide by it, and every reason to circumvent it. Ironically, as those countries now do not currently respect copyrights, researchers there have better access to journal articles, books, and material now than I have ever enjoyed in my entire life (Plus ca change..?). My actions merely put me on the same level as people living in totalitarian states.

I'm looking forward to reading historical and seminal papers from the past, and I hope they will benefit my future contributions to the literature. I would encourage and implore others who have access to similar archives to make them freely available to the public at the earliest opportunity. Mankind as a whole will benefit from your altruism.

Re:You mean they are reacting to...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If your institution is not properly supporting your ability to do research by providing you with sufficient library access you should probably find out what they are doing with all the grant money that you give them.

Actually, they spend quite a lot of it on access to papers. The trouble is that they cannot possibly afford complete access to all papers, which, in the digital age they should reasonably have.

The only barrier to universal, free access to academic papers for all citizens, is the copyrights granted to academic publishers. These barriers serve only to generate private profit and are thus not in the public interest. As such, the public should withdraw these copyright privileges immediately.

Re:when to when?

[maxwell demon]

From when is easy to answer: 1665. That's because at least one of the articles put online is from 1665, and before 1665 the journal didn't exist.

Re:when to when?

[ThorGod]

Answered my own question:

Delayed open access:
Articles more than 12 months old (biological sciences) and 24 months old (physical sciences) are freely available to all. This excludes the Digital Journal Archive (1665-2000).

from: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/misc/about.xhtml

Re:350 years?

[maxwell demon]

I wish there were an edit button on /. 350, 350, 350, 350. Ok, my fingers seem to have that pattern down now.

Yeah, that training will surely pay out as soon as you want to type the number 305. :-)

Secrets and lies

[Quiet_Desperation]

Sadly, the subversive papers of the Royal Anti-Society are still being suppressed.

Re:Articles freely available to all

[TaoPhoenix]

That's a lot of TFA's!

Obligatory O'Brian reference

[CaptainOfSpray]

So, will we finally be able to read Stephen Maturin's papers?

Re:It's about f'ing time...

[maxwell demon]

they should have done this 350 years ago.

Yeah, I also think they should have invented the internet 350 years ago, so they could put the papers online. :-)

Re:305 years?

[serviscope_minor]

1655

1665 (the year before the great fire).

Re:350 Years of Silence?

[rossdee]

It wouldn't be a very big file in Mp3 format...

Blooper reel?

[CODiNE]

My favorite thing to see in old publications are some of the whack ideas and how completely obvious they were considered. Like this gem from Alexander Ross against Sir. Thomas Brown.

So may he doubt whether in cheese and timber worms are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shellfish, snails, eels, and such like, be procreated of putrefied matter, which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts of this let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants

Lest you think I'm anti-science, it was empirical evidence that finally showed the error of such beliefs. I'm just amazed how much people take for granted even in their own area of expertise.

Also a lot of fun is the guy who believed all humans were born with tails that the midwives cut off to hide the truth from the general population. But I don't think anybody agreed with him.

Re:Blooper reel?

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

Lest you think I'm anti-science, it was empirical evidence that finally showed the error of such beliefs. I'm just amazed how much people take for granted even in their own area of expertise.

You don't have to go back nearly so far as Browne and Ross to find examples of this. My father got a PhD in physical geography in the mid 1960s, and spent a lot of time working with people in the geology department while doing so. There were several faculty (at a very respected school) who were absolutely convinced that plate tectonics was a ridiculous theory, and who loudly derided it whenever they had the chance. Now no geologist would say the same thing. When the entire Slashdot archive becomes available for neural uplinking, our post-singularity android descendants will chuckle when they read about we idiots who thought such obviously untrue things were true. Science generates provisional knowledge; today's best explanation might be proven entirely false tomorrow.

And since you brought him up, I'd like to throw in a plug for Sir Thomas Browne. Browne was doctor and a semi-amateur natural historian, but also one of the great prose stylists in the history of the English language. He wrote several great and very strange essays ("Hydrotaphia" and "Religio Medici" being the most famous ones, and the "Garden of Cyrus" the most scientific of the ones actually in print today) and was hugely influential on a small but select group of very great writers -- Coleridge, Melville, Poe, Woolf, and Borges. His syntax is even knottier than average for the 17th century, and he writes some of the longest sentences in our language. But once you get used to his style you'll be with a delightful and delightfully strange mind, who gives great insight into (among other things) the workings of a natural philosopher in the 17th century. The era was not nearly as mechanist as 20th century historians retroactively decided that it was, and Browne is an example of that. He also shows, wonderfully, how blurry the line between the amateur and the professional natural philosopher was in the era, and a little of what we've lost because of the (necessary) specialization of the scientist over the last couple of centuries.