Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access | Hacker News Reader

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access

royalsociety.org

158 pointsteoruiz27 comments

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.

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...

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.

"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....

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

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

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

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

I'm pretty sure Tony Hoare went straight from Elliot Brothers to a Professor of CS post in '68 and then onto a Professorship at Oxford.

That first referenced paper is very much in 'don't try this at home' territory.

Pity the Sony Bono copyright law didn't apply or Franklin's decedents would still have the copyright on electricity!

And Trinity College would be collecting a royalty everytime an apple fell off a tree!

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....

and An Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances by Thomas Bayes. http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/53/370.full.p...

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

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.

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/

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

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.

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).

They didn't have much choice in the matter. For a few months now there is a torrent floating around with most of this stuff in it.

While I think it's a bit extreme to say they didn't have much choice, it seems to me making data more open is becoming somewhat trendy and this sort of peer pressure may have certainly played a role in the Royal Society's decision. Anyways, the inertia of the status quo shouldn't be underestimated and although things are really not that fair, it will probably take quite a bit of time before we see widespread democratization of data.

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).

Those are 'long s' characters, not f. They were used for lower case s at the start or middle of a word. I don't recall why.

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

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.

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.

He didn't say it did - but it is an issue with converting and indexing old documents. Google's ngrams for instance regularly transcribes them as 'f' so you have to search for both possibilities.

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

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!

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.... (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.

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