Behind the scenes of Philosophical Transactions

Behind the scenes of Philosophical Transactions

by Aileen Fyfe

When we think about the Philosophical Transactions being 360 years old, it’s easy to focus on the continuity: ever since March 1665, a periodical of that name has been published in London, more or less regularly. It has been informally associated with the Royal Society since the start and formally owned and managed by the Society since 1752. There are very few other periodicals (of any sort, scientific or otherwise) that have such old origins and are still in print. 

But the continuity of title disguises the many changes that the Philosophical Transactions has gone through. Some of these are visible by examining the printed pages (or their digital replicas), while others only become apparent when we look behind the scenes at the archival materials in London. Some of these are now digitised on Science in the Making. 

On the printed page

Examining the printed pages enables us to identify changes in format, appearance, literary style and subject matter. Henry Oldenburg’s Transactions was issued in (usually) 16-page issues, (usually) monthly. In the early days, it carried short items of just a few pages, and they were mostly anonymous (though Oldenburg’s editorial intervention was visible as he transcribed, excerpted and sometimes translated from his correspondence, and excerpted and described recent books and pamphlets). By the mid-1670s, Oldenburg was printing slightly longer pieces that were more often in the correspondents’ own words.

During Hans Sloane’s editorship, at the start of the eighteenth century, the Transactions usually appeared every other month, and its issues were now around 40 pages. Sloane still published extracts and translations, but he mostly published contributions by named correspondents describing empirical observations or case histories. He published more on natural history and medicine than on the physical sciences.

Illustrations for issue 282, volume 23, under the editorship of Hans Sloane.

In 1752, the Royal Society officially took over the management of the Transactions, and in the years that followed, it settled down into a mature form that lasted for over a century. By 1800, during the presidency of Joseph Banks, the Transactions contained only original observations or experimental results, all of which were written by (or communicated via) a Fellow of the Society. The average length of these research letters had risen to 10 pages and they appeared in chunky ‘parts’ issued twice a year.

Printing in parts, title-page and contents of part II, volume 72.

In 1887, the Transactions was divided into two series: series A for physical sciences, and series B for biological sciences. Research was no longer framed as correspondence but presented as long essays by named authors. The average length of a paper was over 30 pages, and they were now issued as separate monographs (though there was still an annual volume).

In the 1960s, the Transactions began issuing collections of papers arising from the Royal Society’s new thematic Discussion Meetings. By the 1990s, curating these ‘thematic issues’ (with or without a meeting) would become the main purpose of the Transactions.

Discussion meeting on air pollution, 1969.

Most of these changes in the length, subject matter, authorship or literary style of Transactions can be seen in the printed and digital page, though the changing periodicity and form of issue is more difficult to see from the digital edition.

Behind the scenes

The Royal Society’s rich archives reveal how contributions were selected and edited for publication; as well as the administrative and financial arrangements that made it possible for the Royal Society to keep the journals afloat for all these decades. The administrative paperwork is (at present) still only accessible by visiting the archives in person, but the editorial archive is digitised and available to explore on ‘Science in the Making’. These documents give us:

An overview of the entire editorial process. In 1853, a new secretary, William Sharpey, began to keep a ledger known as the Register of Papers. His successors continued it until computerisation arrived in 1990. The existence of this register gives us a picture of the entire editorial landscape at the Royal Society. There is nothing like it for earlier times, though the minute books do record papers presented at meetings, which could in principle be compared to what was later published. The Register of Papers allows us at a glance to see everything that was submitted, its progress through the editorial process, and its eventual fate. It makes visible who acted as referees for each paper (if it was sent to referees); allows us to spot a trickle of female authors; and the rise of co-authorship.

Referee reports. From the 1830s onwards, the Royal Society’s Committee of Papers began to ask individual Fellows to read papers that had been submitted, and to report in writing on their suitability for publication in the Transactions. Over 14,000 of these reports survive, offering a fascinating insight not just into the ways Fellows tried to evaluate scientific merit, but into the evolution of refereeing practices themselves.

In the mid- to late nineteenth century, these reports usually took the form of a letter to the secretary (from 1853-1885, this was George G. Stokes), and could vary from brief (e.g. Charles Darwin) to multiple pages (e.g. Stokes himself). In the 1890s, a printed report form was introduced, with standard questions and blank space for answers. Some fellows were remarkably spare in their comments, while others continued on the back of the form.

These forms also make clear that authors were never anonymised at the Royal Society. Joseph Banks had told a correspondent in 1791 that the Society ‘never’ considered a paper ‘without a name’. This still held true in the twentieth century, despite the possibilities of implicit bias when names (and titles) were gendered.

Papers that were rejected: the Royal Society did not historically use the term ‘rejection’, preferring to describe papers as either ‘withdrawn’ (by the author) or ‘archived’ (because the manuscripts were deposited in the Society’s archive, rather than published in the Transactions). Before the creation of the Register of Papers, it is difficult to get an overall sense of the balance between acceptances and rejections, but for the 1780s, the minute books suggest that perhaps 25% of submissions were not published. From the 1850s onwards (until the 1970s), the rejection rate was lower (around 10%), partly because the requirement to be communicated by a Fellow (until 1990) was an effective pre-submission screening process; and largely because, after 1831, many papers were published in an abridged form in the new journal Proceedings rather than being completely rejected.

The Society’s determination to keep all manuscripts presented to it mean that the ‘archived papers’ are a fascinating collection of what might have been. They include many papers by ‘unknown authors’, but also some by well-known figures; and they hint at the changing (narrowing) intellectual remit of the Royal Society.

Most of these papers languished in the archive until historians came looking for them in the twentieth century, though Lord Rayleigh rediscovered J.J. Waterston’s paper offering a kinetic theory of gases:

Editorial interventions: The archival material also reveals that, even when papers were published in the Transactions, the printed version could differ from the manuscript sent in by the author. Papers in Proceedings in the mid-nineteenth century originated as the secretary’s abstract of a longer paper, originally written for the Society’s minute books. But papers in Transactions might also be cut down from what the author originally submitted.

There are many drawings (and later, photographs) that could not be published for financial, editorial or technological reasons:

It also becomes clear that the Society’s secretaries were willing to make both small and large editorial interventions. In 1782, for instance, President Joseph Banks told Secretary Charles Blagden that he had been reading a manuscript sent from Vienna by Jan Ingen-Housz which contained ‘some good experiments mixed with no small abuse’ directed at English chemist Joseph Priestley. Banks told Blagden that he planned to ‘cut out the abuse and read the Experiments to the Soc[iety]’. The archival manuscript does indeed show whole pages crossed out (at the start), as well as minor deletions, and marginal instructions to the typesetters (most notably, not to start setting until the ‘begin here’ on page 6).

The idea that authors should be responsible for making revisions to their own papers was a later development. Even though referees from the mid-nineteenth century onwards sometimes made suggestions for revisions, the Royal Society’s insistence that the date of receipt of the original paper was the key date for priority mitigated against later revisions that might introduce new findings. It is not always clear who made the revisions to manuscripts.

When writing our book, my co-authors and I used the Royal Society archives extensively, though we were well aware that our ambition to survey the full 350-year history of Royal Society publishing (as it was then) meant that we could not go into depth on some of the stories we found. At the time, we thought we might well be the first and last people to look at some of these materials – but the digitisation of ‘Science in the Making’ has now opened them up to scholars around the world. We look forward to seeing more of these stories told!

About the author:

Aileen Fyfe is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. She researches the history of science and technology, focusing particularly on the communication of science, and the technologies which made that possible. She led an unprecedented investigation of the entire history of the Philosophical Transactions as part of an AHRC-funded project on the world's oldest scientific journal, and has advised the project behind Science in the Making since 2015.  Her most recent monograph, A History of Scientific Journals (2022), is devoted to the evolution of Royal Society journals since 1665.