Abstract:
In 2015, the Royal Society of London celebrated the 350th anniversary
of the Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first and longest-running
scientific journal. The celebrations looked to both past and future. There
was an exhibition on the history of the Transactions, a series of video
stories and a set of specially commissioned commentaries reflecting on
the significance of key historic research papers. There was a four-day
meeting on the ‘Future of Scientific Scholarly Communication’, where
representatives from publishers, funders and other learned organisations
discussed current problems with research evaluation, reproducibility,
and the business of publishing, while wondering what the future might
look like.1 Underlying these activities and the associated media coverage
was the assumption that the event being celebrated was the invention of
the scientific journal
