Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society. In its earliest days, it was a private venture of the Royal Society's secretary.[1][2] It was established in 1665,[3] making it the second journal in the world exclusively devoted to science,[2] after the Journal des sçavans, and therefore also the world's longest-running scientific journal.[2] It became an official society publication in 1752.[4] The use of the word philosophical in the title refers to natural philosophy, which was the equivalent of what would now be generally called science.
"Transactions of the Royal Society" redirects here. For other uses, see Transactions of the Royal Society (disambiguation).Discipline
English
6 March 1665
Philos. Trans. R. Soc.
Current publication[edit]
In 1887 the journal expanded and divided into two separate publications, one serving the physical sciences (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences) and the other focusing on the life sciences (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences). Both journals now publish themed issues and issues resulting from papers presented at the scientific meetings of the Royal Society. Primary research articles are published in the sister journals Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology Letters, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Interface Focus, Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science.
Public domain and access[edit]
In July 2011 programmer Greg Maxwell released through The Pirate Bay the nearly 19,000 articles that had been published before 1923 and were therefore in the public domain in the United States, to support Aaron Swartz in his case. The articles had been digitized for the Royal Society by JSTOR for a cost of less than US$100,000 and public access to them was restricted through a paywall.[29][30]
In August 2011, users uploaded over 18,500 articles to the collections of the Internet Archive.[31] The collection received 50,000 views per month by November 2011.[32]
In October of the same year, the Royal Society released for free the full text of all its articles prior to 1941 but denied that this decision had been influenced by Maxwell's actions.[29]
In 2017, the Royal Society launched a completely re-digitised version of the complete journal archive back to 1665 in high resolution and with enhanced metadata. All the out of copyright material is completely free to access without a login.[33]
