The first systematised form of scientific dissemination was the writing of personal correspondence which, as I have explained previously, was decidedly not up to the task. Realising the shortcomings of this method of scholarly communication, several of these nascent scientists hit upon the same solution: the scholarly journal.
The first periodical publication that could be described as a scholarly journal was the Journal des Sçavans (literally “journal of scholars”) and it was published by French writer and lawyer Denis de Sallo, although in a move that has caused not some small amount of controversy amongst historians, he initially published it under the name of his butler. Quite why he chose to do this is unknown. It could have been out of sheer modesty, but the more likely explanation is that some of the literary reviews in the Journal were of a very critical nature. Combined with the fact that de Sallo himself was an advocate for a French church that was independent of Rome, he may have been too timid to publish some of the more controversial theological material under his own name.
It is not at all clear why he was so keen to throw his butler under the bus.
The first twelve-page edition of the Journal was published on 5th January, 1665 and it was aimed at the intellectual elite, containing obituaries of famous people – invariably men – ecclesiastical histories and various legal reports. The social and economic turmoil of the French Revolution caused the journal to cease publication in 1792. It popped back up again briefly in 1797, then disappeared again until 1816 when it was relaunched under the title Journal des Savants. It continues to be published as such to this day.
A mere two months after the first issue of Journal des Sçavans, on 6th March, 1665, another journal appeared. This time on the other side of the English Channel. Philosophical Transactions, Giving some Account of the present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in many considerable parts of the World was published by the secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg mentioned in the last post, who was so thoroughly knackered by all the letters he had to write that he decided to take matters into his own hands. This was the first issue of what was to become the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
That these two journals appeared within weeks of each other seems to be either an extraordinary coincidence or just good old-fashioned imitation. We know that the first issue of the French Journal had been presented by Oldenburg to the rest of the Royal Society on 11th January, 1665, a mere six days after its publication in France, and this fact has been used to claim that Transactions was simply an English imitation of the French Journal, but this accusation is more-or-less groundless. The content and focus of the two journals is very different. Although the first issue of the Journal contains some articles that can be considered scientific in nature, most of the content was literary, whilst the Transactions was entirely devoted to scientific advancements. Robert Moray, in yet another letter to Christiaan Huygens, wrote that the Transactions would not bother with all that “legal and theological nonsense” (my translation).
In addition, some of the material for the first issue of Transactions had already been prepared for publication up to two years previously, and anyone with the merest whiff of experience with the scholarly publishing industry will realise that two months is an impossibly short time to prepare scientific articles for publication. That the two journals appeared at roughly the same time is probably explained by the fact that the intellectual soil in Europe at the time was fertile enough for just such an innovative idea to take root, and the inefficiency of the dominant mode of scientific communication at the time (writing letters and/or publishing books) is likely to have been a contributing factor.
The initial issue of the Philosophical Transactions contained the first report of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and an obituary of a French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat (he of the famous Last Theorum). While the Journal des Sçavans has disappeared and reappeared several times over during its history, Transactions has been published continuously since its first appearance, making it not quite the first scholarly journal, but certainly the first continuously-published scholarly journal.
Within months of each other, the Journal and the Transactions had established the template for scientific and academic periodicals. In a world in which the best way to disseminate information was to print it on rectangles of pulped, dead trees, the scholarly journal was the ideal innovation.
Quite why the academic community is so attached to it in the age of the internet is a bewildering, but important question.
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