Royal Society of London, 1665–

September 22, 2006 3:26 AM

The Royal Society Digital Archive is now on-line and free to use ... until December. Until that time, every article in its collections, going back to 1665, is freely accessible. Poke around, who knows what you might find ... [pdf]
posted by Sonny Jim (21 comments total)

Neato! I can finally read up on all the research I read about in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle!
posted by antifuse at 4:18 AM on September 22, 2006

Hell, I'm reading System of the World right now, so this is extra cool!
posted by thanotopsis at 5:16 AM on September 22, 2006

I ſurely ſuffer ſo much ſeeing the obſolete long s.

It is ſweet though ſince I can make them with Unicode.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:31 AM on September 22, 2006

Great, great find, Sonny Jim. Thanks.
posted by Sk4n at 5:42 AM on September 22, 2006

Very cool!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 6:32 AM on September 22, 2006

Natural philosophers rock, as does Stephenson's Cycle Baroque.
posted by econous at 6:47 AM on September 22, 2006

Thank you very much for this link, loved Baroque Cycle, and have been deep-digging the early scientist/alchemists a lot lately.
posted by sonofsamiam at 6:56 AM on September 22, 2006

Very good stuff!
posted by taosbat at 7:45 AM on September 22, 2006

very good ſtuff you mean.
posted by delmoi at 8:09 AM on September 22, 2006

this is great.
posted by empath at 8:17 AM on September 22, 2006

Anyone got a torrent link?
posted by delmoi at 8:37 AM on September 22, 2006

delmoi: WebGrazer? (Mac)
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:29 AM on September 22, 2006

OOps, meant WebGrabber. Heh.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:31 AM on September 22, 2006

Fascinating. Thank you!
posted by Spacey at 9:47 AM on September 22, 2006

dammit... wish I had seen this before turning in my thesis. It would have been nice to have the citation:

Boyle, R. (1665). An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf. Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1, 10.

Fun
posted by logicpunk at 10:03 AM on September 22, 2006

Anyone remember this one from Quicksilver?
posted by logicpunk at 10:20 AM on September 22, 2006

[this is good]
posted by greycap at 11:16 AM on September 22, 2006

ſtuff indeed!
posted by taosbat at 11:44 AM on September 22, 2006

I wish they would leave the historical stuff available for all to read (such as that published before 1950 or so) Only the last 50 years should be behind a pay wall.

Also, isn't all of this stuff out of copyright at this point anyway?
posted by delmoi at 11:58 AM on September 22, 2006

So how big is this archive? 100 gigs would correspond to 250 kbytes/page * 1000 pages/year * 400 years. I might throw a couple hundred gigs at it, if it isn't a pain to scrape.
posted by ryanrs at 2:09 AM on September 23, 2006

Also, isn't all of this stuff out of copyright at this point anyway?

Most of it is, yes. So, in theory, one could make copies of it and post it elsewhere. However, that doesn't mean that the owners of it can't decide to charge to view it (like, say, fine art in a museum).
posted by antifuse at 9:02 AM on September 23, 2006