If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded. 1 Thus, Thomas Henry Huxley, in a lay sermon on intellectual progress delivered in January 1866, proclaimed one of the central roles of the scientific periodical: as a record of the progress of the sciences. By Huxley's time, Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society of London, was just one of many scientific journals issued by learned societies and commercial publishers. 2 The Royal Society's project to create a Catalogue of Scientific Papers had just finished indexing almost 1400 such journals from all over the world. 3 What made Philosophical Transactions unique, as Huxley knew, was its longevity. Other journals enabled more rapid publication, and other journals contained more specialist research, but no other journal had a back-run that could compare to Transactions. And since Transactions is still with us today, the length of its back-run remains unique: 350 years and still counting.Over those 350 years, scientific periodicals have performed many roles. As well as storing records of research for the future, they have enabled geographically dispersed scholars to communicate, and sometimes to coordinate, their research. They have helped to establish and police knowledge communities. They have served as currency in exchanges that built and maintained relationships between learned societies, and between individual researchers. They have always been part of an interlocking web of oral, manuscript and printed (and, recently, digital) forms through which knowledge and knowledge claims have been transmitted and translated between cultural, linguistic and disciplinary contexts. But, amid that array of communication tools, periodicals have come to be the dominant means by which scientists (or, increasingly, teams of scientists) gain credit for discoveries and build their reputations and careers. The editorial processes for selecting and evaluating papers for publication have become increasingly complex as the social stakes of publication have increased, and, with the professionalization of other fields of academic endeavour over the last century, the practices of science journals and their editors have informed the standards for scholarly publishing in non-scientific fields.The research printed in scientific periodicals has long been mined by historians of science, but communication practices have received more attention since the rise of constructivist accounts of natural knowledge in the 1970s. 4 Historians and sociologists of science have investigated the processes, both formal and informal, through which experimentally based knowledge was disseminated, and thus transformed into publicly acknowledged facts. The first scholarly journals (Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions, in 1665) are now well-establis...

We have used the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, see https:// credit.niso.org/) to describe the co-authors' various contributions to this project, and to acknowledge other people who were essential to research.

In 1803, Charles Hutton, the mathematician, author, and fellow of the Royal Society, sent a note to its president, Sir Joseph Banks, announcing "his intention to undertake the care of arranging and printing a new abridgement of the Philos[ophical] Transactions." 1 The Philosophical Transactions had been founded in 1665 and had been under the direct financial and editorial control of the Royal Society since 1752. 2 Chunky quarto parts of varying lengths appeared roughly at six-month intervals, carrying extensive (and often illustrated) accounts of new scientific observations, discoveries, and experiments. It was the most prestigious research periodical in the English-speaking world. By 1803, its back issues contained many significant contributions to natural knowledge (as well as much that had been disproved or superseded). Hutton proposed to select, abridge, and index the contents of the past 135 years, "trusting that the President and Council would please to countenance this undertaking." 3 This was a lot to take on trust, in two respects. First, Hutton proposed to exploit publications subsidised by the Royal Society for his own gain, and second, his relationship with Banks had not been cordial for twenty years. 4 It is unsurprising, therefore, that the initial response to Hutton's 1803 note was non-committal; only a record of its communication was noted. Yet Hutton and his associates proceeded with the venture and in 1809 applied for and received permission to dedicate the first volume of the Transactions to the "President, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society." 5 Regardless of what personal animosity Banks still felt or what material loss the Royal Society had feared, no one tried to prevent the abridgement from going ahead. And there was material loss to be anticipated: Hutton's Authors' Accepted Manuscript. This paper will appear in a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review in December 2018. project was intended to supersede an earlier abridgement by John Lowthorp, which had found sufficient customers to justify five editions and three successive expansions between 1703 and 1749. Later accounts of Hutton's life published in the town of his birth suggest that he received £6,000 for his work on the abridgement. 6 Whether the Royal Society had any legal power under the copyright statutes in force at the beginning of the nineteenth century to prevent an undertaking of this kind is doubtful. Periodicals were not yet explicitly included in copyright legislation in the United Kingdom; the act of abridgement could be represented as the creation of a new work; and most (though not all) of the material Hutton proposed to use was old enough that it would have been out of copyright anyway. Yet Hutton asked permission from the Royal Society. This is a strong indication that the society had a moral and customary claim to the Transactions which had little or nothing to do with copyright legislation.

We have used the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, see https:// credit.niso.org/) to describe the co-authors' various contributions to this project, and to acknowledge other people who were essential to research.

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