The scientific legacy of the world-famous historical journal archive will be available to the public—fully searchable and online—announced The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific publisher. The archive’s online-access portion will even include the first-ever peer-reviewed scientific journal: the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first appearing in 1665.

The digitization of old and new documents and publications is an important step towards preservation and accessibility—necessary postures for all ages of scientific documents. It’s also been a huge push in the information age, and provides a background for powerful uses of the cloud and the storage capability of the Internet to move data anywhere. Paper is an excellent storage media that lasts centuries when well-preserved; but it’s static and not transformable.

Even the first edition of Philosophical Transactions coming online brings a lot of scientific history into the cloud,

Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal.

Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day.  Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution.

The archive contains a multitude of transformative and instrumental works by a multitude of British scientists and authors who have contributed greatly to the understanding of our world, even some who directly ancestor modern engineering such as Sir Issac Newton’s first published papers, Benjamin Franklin’s legendary account of his electrical kite experiment, and Charles Darwin’s early work on geology.

The announcement goes on to spin an enticing narrative about why reading these old documents may bring frights and chills by describing other interesting stories developed from scientific discovery including “accounts of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks ‘without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.’”

I’ve worked closely with people who labor in the digitization industry, such as those who work for JSTOR—a leading digitization outfit for scholarly and academic published journals—and it’s not been until recently that many peer-reviewed journals have sought the capability of putting themselves in digital format and fewer had expected to become part of the cloud. As a result, the effort for digitization has felt largely niche; but the obvious and powerful implications of highly accessible scientific material affect not just the scholarly community, but also healthcare, engineering, civil engineering, and even politics.

With a greater variety of scientific literature available all around the world at a moment’s notice it saves on the costs of locating it in dusty book-filled archives (not that library spelunking isn’t an extremely enjoyable experience) and shipping it overseas. It also means that our professionals have quicker access to the periodicals and knowledge that they need to do their jobs and it will help profoundly impact our ability as a technological culture to make the next leaps forward.

The article ends with a quote by Thomas Huxley FRS from 1870, with which it’s hard to disagree:

“If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were to be destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded.”

Although, I’d be rather sad if we lost the great architectural literary works of the history of our authors; and getting these documents digitized, puffed up into the cloud, and delivered on a virtual platter will make then much less likely to perish from this Earth.