The Royal Society has launched a spiffy new site that lets you browse highlights of the last 350 years of science as published in the Philosophical Transactions ("Giving Some Accompt of the Present Understanding, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World since 1665."). These include things like Ben Franklin's very matter-of-fact instructions for flying a kite in a thunderstorm, Thomas Young's introduction of the wave theory of light, and Maxwell's original treatise on electromagnetism. These are available as scanned PDF's, in all their oddly-typeset glory (you can see them move from setting every s as an f, to only some of them, to finally producing pages that don't look like a phonetically rendered speech impediment to modern eyes).
In keeping with the current annoying practice, it's all Flash, so I can't link directly to anything within the site, but it's worth poking around a little. They've got some cool stuff in there. The highlighted papers are freely available, too, though you may need a subscription to access other articles in the journal.
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For those unable (or unwilling) to use Flash, there is a .pdf with short summaries and links to the articles (in .pdf as well) available at: http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/pdf/All.pdf
(I already blogged about it yesterday ;P )
This came into my inbox on 11/30. I haven't tried it, but it looks like everything is free to access for a couple of months. Details at http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/authors/2010.xhtml , which seems not to be restricted to authors, however.
Celebrating three and a half centuries of science
During the Royal Society's 350th anniversary year, we are celebrating our contribution to science publishing by launching several commemorative initiatives, all of which are completely FREE to access.
Trailblazing is an online, interactive timeline showcasing sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive. All articles are accompanied by an illustrated commentary, highlighting the significance of the ground-breaking discovery and its influence on the modern world. Trailblazing is free to access from today.
The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive is arguably the most comprehensive publishing archive in science. It dates back to 1665 and contains more than 65,000 articles - from the very first peer-reviewed paper in Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent interdisciplinary article in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The archive is free to access from today until 28 February 2010.
Similar initiatives will be launched throughout the next twelve months, including open access commemorative issues of Philosophical Transactions A and Philosophical Transactions B; and the publication of Seeing Further: the story of science and the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson.
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