Open Access Digitized Journals and
Serialized Natural History Publications Online

This website is designed to provide the user with a one-stop shopping to as many digitized journal series as possible. Links to list of issues available for pdf download are given for each journal and derive from a variety of sources (see list below).

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Abbreviations and Instructions:
AMNH: American Museum of Natural History—they have a search interface allowing you to search for articles in their publication series. We've linked to the American Museum Novitates and Bulletin series, which have the vast majority of natural history articles of intest. However, once on the site you can navigate to other series you may be interested in.
BHL: Biodiversity Heritage Library—this is a consortium of institutions that have provided books and journals for digitizing and are made available on this site. We have links that get you directly to the page that lists the volume of the journals concerned. At that point, you can click on the + sign next to the volume to see a list of choices for downloading. If you are unsiure of the contents, click on OCR and a full text of the volume will appear on the screen. Use the "find" function of your browser to search for a particular word in the article you are desiring. If it does not show up, you are at the wrong volume. Once you find the right volume, click on pdf to download. Right click to download directly to your desktop. BHL is continually adding more material and we will add them as we find them on the BHL site. NB: BHL does not have full runs of all the journals they list, although they do for some. Their runs are based on volumes supplied to them by the consortium partners. In some cases more than one BHL link is provided for a jourjnal title because each link provides different volumes. For copyright reasons, runs of volume numbers will usually end at 1922 or 1923. Check each BHL link to make sure you get the volume you want. Google also has volumes that may be different than the ones offered by BHL. Make sure you check each link to ensure you have looked everywhere for the particular volume you are interested in.
BPBM: Bishop Museum—all the scholarly publications of Bishop Museum are being made available online. The links we provide get you to the page listing all the articles within a series. Links there are directly to pdf files of the articles or whole issues. Some issue have links to tables of contents with further details on articles and links directly to pdf files.
Gallica: This is the digitized library of the Bibliotheque National de France and contains a large amount of older natural history works. We have provided links directly to the page from which you can choose from volumes. Click on "Get the document" to open the volume on your screen. Once you open a particular volume, you can click on the pdf icon at the top to start the pdf process. You will be given a choice of downloading a copy of the entire volume (from first page to last page) or download a single page (instructions are a mixture of English and French).
GDZ: Göttingen University digitzing project—they have a vast amount of older natural history works digitized (mainly books). We have links to a few books that are sometimes considered as journals or serialized publications.
Google: Google Books—this (along with BHL) is another major digitizing project that has been gathering books and journals from many libraries and institutions worldwide. As with BHL, the list is expanding at an exponential rate and we will be adding new titles as we find them on Google. We have provided below links to journals that get you directly to the list of volumes for that title. First thing to do once you click on a link for your favorite journal, is click on "Full View" which filters the available volumes to just those that are available for downloading. If you know the volume you want, click on that link and the volume will appear on your screen. The web version is searchable (note that the pdf you will download is not OCR'd), so you can type in a word to search on screen and a list of pages on which the word appears in the volume shows up on the right side. Use this to gauge if this is the volume you want. If it is, go back to summary and download using the pdf link in the upper right. Clicking the pdf download automatically downloads to your desktop -- no need to right click.
Publisher's websites: Some journals are only available on the website of the publisher. We have tried to find as many of these that allow free downloads and have provided those links. AMNH, BPBM, MNHN, and SCIELO (Brazil) are a few of these.

Corrections/additions?
Any corrections to the information and links proiided here are always welcome. Also, if there are journal series not listed here yet that you are aware of, please send me the information and I will add them. We are continually adding, so keep checking back as we add more and more. Access to journals requiring subscriptions we cannot list. Send comments to: neale[at]bishopmuseum[dot]org

Page last revised 6 May 2009