What do mammoths, meteors and the principals of moral philosophy have in common? They can easily be looked up on our brand-new platform, which is a public-access, free-of-charge tool that allows you to browse through all the scientific books and articles the Royal Academy has published since 1745.

Ever since establishing the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters during the Age of Enlightenment in Denmark, makingscience and scientific results accessible to everyone has been a fixed part of the Royal Academy’s agenda. As a result, we are now launching a brand new online public access platform that allows you to browse through all books that have been published by the Royal Academy since the establishing of the Academy’s publication house in 1745.

Whether you are a scientist, a student, or simply just curious about science and its long history, the platform gives you free unlimited access to just about 6.500 research papers, counting no less than 300.000 pages of scientific material, covering a wide field of scientific and historical topics.

A handy tool and a candy store in one

To create the most flexible and user-friendly tool, we have put a lot of time and work into developing the publication platform. A team of experts have worked hard to create a custom-made product containing picture scans of a high image quality, search functions matching the needs of the user as well as downloading functions. A high standard of optical character recognition (OCR) has also been a focal point in developing the platform. The OCR has been successful in most cases, although we are still waiting for the technical advantages that allow the OCR to work well on texts written in gothic letters.

One of the experts of the team behind the creation of the platform is former editor at the Royal Academy, DPhil Marita Akhøj Nielsen, who possesses an extensive knowledge when it comes to the bibliography of the Royal Academy:

“It is wonderful to be able to open the treasure chest of scientific results that is the published material of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and share it with everyone. There is so much to read – and so many fascinating pictures to look at – that it is positively overwhelming”, she says.

New titles all the time

Naturally, we intend to keep the platform updated with the newest scientific publications from the Royal Academy and will therefore continuously upload new publications only a year after publishing the printed version. In the meantime, the books will of course be available for purchasing on the Royal Academy’s web shop.

So, whether you are looking to find something about different species of octopuses, Punic idols, records of King Canute’s coin collection or the astronomical observations of Venus’ passage by the Sun in 1769 – or any other subject, really – you have come to the right place.

To access the publication platform, click here.

Should you have any questions, please write an e-mail to the secretariat of the Royal Academy on kdvs@royalacademy.dk.