This section explores the history of the periodical from 1665 to today. Experience free to start hither, with a general overview, and/or click around on the case studies which correspond key decades and changes. If you are particularly interested in the history of printing, have a look at the List of printers of Philosophical Transactions. Y'all can learn more most the people behind the journal with our List of editors of Philosophical Transactions. The glossary covers historical changes and terms, and you can explore our sources in closer detail here. Exit a annotate or contact us @ahrcphiltrans if you accept whatever questions.

The earth's oldest scientific periodical

Henry Oldenburg

Philosophical Transactions, the earth's first and longest-running scientific periodical, began life in 1665.  Though always associated with the Majestic Society of London in the minds of its readers, it was in fact the initiative and personal holding of the Society's first Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, a native of Bremen, who drew on the office of Secretary, his ain prodigious network of natural-philosophical contacts, and his considerable skills as a linguist to produce the material that became the Philosophical Transactions.  The early journal consisted of alphabetic character-excerpts, reviews and summaries of recently-published books, and accounts of observations and experiments from European natural philosophers.  Though a number of early pieces – by and large of an astronomical and mathematical nature – were printed in Latin, the principal language of the journal was English. Later on his death Philosophical Transactions passed through the hands of a series of subsequent editors, commonly also Secretaries of the Society (some of them, such as Edmond Halley or Hans Sloane, very well-known to the register of scientific discipline), and a succession of printers.  During this fourth dimension – upwards to 1752, when the Royal Society took over financial responsibility for the periodical – the course and content of Philosophical Transactions altered in ways that broadly reflected the priorities of the various editors, and to some extent those of the Lodge as well.

Learn more about how Philosophical Transactions operated in 17th and 18th centuries.

Subsequently the Guild'south takeover, the processes of publishing an article in the Phil Trans were gradually formalised.  These included norms for submission and evaluation, including systematic peer review by the heart of the xixthursday Century; as a consequence the postage of the individual editor which can oftentimes exist discerned in the early journal disappears every bit editorial responsibility was transferred to a Committee of Papers .  Despite the emergence of numerous other learned societies and inquiry institutions in Great britain in the late eighteenthursday and throughout the  19th Century, many of them with avowedly dedicated to a unmarried co-operative of scientific knowledge (such as the Astronomical Lodge or the Geological and Chemical Societies) and many of them with their own periodicals, Philosophical Transactions remained a determinedly generalist publication, resisting moves towards greater specialisation until 1887, when the journal finally bowed to the inevitable and split into two series, 'A' and 'B', for the physical and biological sciences respectively.

Larn more about howPhilosophical Transactions operated in the 19th century.

Figures from 'Observations on the Nebulae' by Lord Rosse, (Phil. Trans. vol 140, 1850), including summit left, the M51 spiral milky way © The Royal Gild

The 20th Century saw further changes to the content of the periodical, although the link with the Imperial Gild's own scientific action was maintained.  The journal, e'er a drain on the Society's resources, began to feel more urgently the force per unit area from the proliferation of scientific journals from commercial and university presses, and the Society's various deliberations about Philosophical Transactions during this period reflect the fragile residuum to be struck between the journal's (and the Order's) prestige and its commercial interests, particularly the difficulty of keeping a generalist periodical competitive in an increasingly specialist marketplace.  The Guild'south Commission of Papers was finally abolished in 1990 and responsibility restored to individual editors; a model that prevails to the present. The periodical first went online in 1997, and the unabridged back issue annal to 1887 has been freely available since 2010.

Larn more about howPhilosophical Transactions operated in 20th &  21st centuries.

During its long life the journal has published papers by many of the great names in the history of science, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Antoni van Leeuwenhoeck, Gottfried Leibnitz, Edmond Halley, Hans Sloane, Benjamin Franklin, William and Caroline Herschel, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Joseph Priestley, Charles Darwin, Gideon Mantell, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Dorothy Hodgkin, Alan Turing, Kathleen Lonsdale, Uta Frith, and Stephen Hawking; and, co-ordinate to various accounts, it has given rise to or been instrumental in establishing many of the features of mod scholarly communication, including the peer review procedure and the scientific article itself.  This roll of accolade belies the journal'south history in some respects, notwithstanding; its fortunes fluctuated with those of its editors, with crises in the Royal Society itself (some of which the periodical helped precipitate), with changing patterns of scholarly authorship and readership, and, of course, with the vagaries of the print trade.  Our projection will provide the showtime comprehensive business relationship of this history, which at the moment consists mostly of vast blanks broken upwardly by the occasional patch of illumination, using the Royal Social club's comprehensive archive to read the journal, not principally equally a tape of scientific action only every bit an index of the social, economic and cultural history and impact of scientific communication.