Thanks for the alert. Yay, SA OA! It looks like this was meant to be for Nature subscribers, but they have inadvertently left it open for everyone. (Or am I misunderstanding?)
I assumed that Sci Am is simply owned by Nature, and it’s meant for everybody.
You seem to be right that Scientific American is owned by Nature now, but I can see no sign of this access on the Scientific American home page, or their archive page (which only seems to go back to 2001, and only gives ‘teaser’ access to non-subscribers, even for those years).
That phrase “you and your patrons” makes me think this access is intended for subscribing libraries (who deserve something, after totally paying through the nose for their Nature subscriptions). However, perhaps I should shut up before someone at the Nature web site notices this thread and closes down access.
I wouldn’t worry about that, I don’t recall exactly where I heard about it from but it was some kind of public thing like an RSS feed, likely with much more readers than the SDMB. The cat’s out of the bag.
Hi from Nature Publishing Group,
Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group (who also publish Nature). The Scientific American archive is available on nature.com, as that is where we provide access to subscribing libraries to *Scientific American *and its archives. It isn’t currently available on scientificamerican.com.
You’re quite right that usually subscribing libraries need to pay for access to the Scientific American archive. But to celebrate completing the digitization of the archive back to 1845, we’ve made the 1845-1909 collection free to everyone from 1-30 November 2011. You don’t have to be a subscriber, or at a subscribing institution. We hope you find it interesting, and enjoy the articles from this historic collection.
Happy to answer any further questions,
Grace Baynes
Nature Publishing Group
It’s worth noting that Scientific American up to 1869 is permanently available for free through Cornell University’s Making of America archive.
Shouldn’t everything up to the 1920s or so be in the public domain by now? By making it free for a little while, anyone can now copy it and host a copy, right?
Yep.
Of course, people who have access to it through libraries and other subscriptions could also have done that previously. Making it free just expands the number of people with access.
ETA:
Although, if you wanted to do that with all issues from 1870 through 1909, you’d need a fair amount of server space and bandwidth. Each edition appears to be about 10MB, give or take a bit, meaning that 40 years’ worth at about 50 issues a year would take up over 20GB of hard drive space.