The Royal Society of England has decided to put some of their most influential or groundbreaking papers up online at http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/.

Their selected papers include papers by Sir Issac Newton,
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Stone, Bayes, James Watt, James Cook, Young, Herschel, Joule, Maxwell, Rutherford, Fisher, Dirac, and many, many more.

The Royal Society (full name: The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) was founded in 1660, and in over three and a half centuries has become a major force in science, both in funding, and publishing. The Royal Society publishes several journals, including my favorites, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, as well as the world’s longest running scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (first published 6 March 1665). For funding opportunities, I urge you to examine other sources, as I have no information.

The Trailblazing site allows you to download the papers, either singly, or by genre. if you have never read a scientific paper, I urge you to grab one, and take a look. For an exceptionally beautiful paper, I recommend This paper by Crick and Watson. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written, and elegant in the science. I once read on the Nature website that this paper was considered so obviously correct by the editor that it was immediately published, and thus made it as one of the handful of modern scientific papers that were published in a reputable journal without peer review.