PNAS issues from 1915 online
Some days back, the archive of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (of the USA) was extended back to 1915. Browsing the back issues tells much about how science was done back then. Publication style changed quite a bit over the years. The canonical methods/results/discussion separation was not enforced back in the 20s and the publications read more like letters that the highly standardized, specialized publication we get today.
Also, the short titles of the single author papers show how it was possible to be achieve much without running being part of larger group.
It would be nice if all journals would open their archives this way. Nature is (only) going back to 1950 and requires special licenses for issues from 1996 back. Science has not made his back issues available before 1997 - if you want to read about the genome of Haemophilus influenzae, you'll have to order it.
For the bioinformatic text miners, the character recognition and access to the whole corpus might remain an issue. It will be nice to have the whole corpus of scientific publications under one roof - it won't take much more than a couple of years to complete.
Also, the short titles of the single author papers show how it was possible to be achieve much without running being part of larger group.
It would be nice if all journals would open their archives this way. Nature is (only) going back to 1950 and requires special licenses for issues from 1996 back. Science has not made his back issues available before 1997 - if you want to read about the genome of Haemophilus influenzae, you'll have to order it.
For the bioinformatic text miners, the character recognition and access to the whole corpus might remain an issue. It will be nice to have the whole corpus of scientific publications under one roof - it won't take much more than a couple of years to complete.
spitshine - 2005-08-23 16:40