The Bibliothèque Scientifique Numérique (Digital Scientific Library) is a programme launched in 2008 by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

One of its goals is to provide the entire research community with a common resource base. Based on a central funding mechanism, the licences nationales (French licences) scheme was thus set up. For the time being, they cover the purchase of archives.

The first resources purchased in 2011 include the Springer archives, i.e. over 1,000 scholarly journals published by Springer between the beginning and 1996.

The Springer archives can be accessed online by any reader belonging to a French higher education institution, even when the institution itself hasn’t subscribed to Springerlink.

Some free or subscription-based resources provide access to journal archives. Collections start with the first issue of every journal and end with issues published approximately 5 years before the current year.