The first scientific journal began on 6 March 1665

The world’s first and longest-running scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, published its first issue on 6 March 1665 (16 March by today’s Gregorian calendar), edited by the Royal Society’s first Secretary, Henry Oldenburg. It appeared monthly and sold for one shilling.

It began less as an institution than as a side venture. Oldenburg received no salary from the Royal Society and lived largely on stipends from Robert Boyle, while writing individual letters to hundreds of correspondents across Europe. Printing a monthly digest let him reach them all at once and, as the Society itself puts it, perhaps make some money on the side. Early issues mixed edited letters, book reviews and accounts of observations and experiments.

The correspondence carried risks. In 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Oldenburg was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of passing information to the enemy, because of his scientific letters to a Dutch colleague.

Who owned it?

For its first 87 years the journal was not formally the Society’s. After Oldenburg died in 1677, successive secretaries, among them Edmond Halley and Hans Sloane, edited it and carried its costs themselves. Only in 1752, after decades of satire aimed at the Society by writers such as Jonathan Swift, did the Society take it over, with papers chosen by a 21-person committee. More systematic expert peer review followed in the 1830s.

The money never came as Oldenburg hoped: the journal ran at a loss for most of its existence, and only from the mid-20th century did its income regularly exceed its costs. Its lasting contribution is the dated, public record of who found what first, which still underpins scientific publishing.