A history of scientific journals. Publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015

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