[6] The full title of the journal, as given by Oldenburg, was "Philosophical Transactions, Giving some Accompt [sic] of the present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in many considerable parts of the World".

[7] The society's council minutes dated 1 March 1664 (in the Old Style calendar; equivalent to 11 March 1665 in the modern New Style calendar) ordered that "the Philosophical Transactions, to be composed by Mr Oldenburg, be printed the first Monday of every month, if he have sufficient matter for it, and that that tract be licensed by the Council of this Society, being first revised by some Members of the same".

[4] The familiar functions of the scientific journal—registration (date stamping and provenance), certification (peer review), dissemination, and archiving—were introduced at inception by Philosophical Transactions.

Issue 1 contained such articles as: an account of the improvement of optic glasses; the first report on the Great Red Spot of Jupiter; a prediction on the motion of a recent comet (probably an Oort cloud object); a review of Robert Boyle's Experimental History of Cold; Robert Boyle's own report of a deformed calf; "A report of a peculiar lead-ore from Germany, and the use thereof"; "Of an Hungarian Bolus, of the Same Effect with the Bolus Armenus"; "Of the New American Whale-Fishing about the Bermudas", and "A Narrative Concerning the Success of Pendulum-Watches at Sea for the Longitudes".

The final article of the issue concerned "The Character, Lately Published beyond the Seas, of an Eminent Person, not Long Since Dead at Tholouse, Where He Was a Councellor of Parliament".

[1] It has been argued that Oldenburg benefitted from this ambiguity, retaining both real and perceived independence (giving the publication an air of authenticity) and the prospect of monetary gain, while simultaneously enjoying the credibility afforded by the association.

The society also enjoyed the benefits of ambiguity: it was able to communicate advances in natural philosophy, undertaken largely in its own name, without the worry that it was directly responsible for its content.

Certainly the tone of the early volumes was set by Oldenburg, who often related things he was told by his contacts, translated letters and manuscripts from other languages, and reviewed books, always being sure to indicate the provenance of his material and even to use this to impress the reader.

In fact, the first English newspaper, The London Gazette (which was an official organ of government and therefore seen as sanitized), did not appear until after Philosophical Transactions in the same year.

Oldenburg's compulsive letter writing to foreign correspondents led to him being suspected of being a spy for the Dutch and interned in the Tower of London in 1667.

The journal would henceforth be published "for the sole use and benefit of this Society"; it would be financially carried by the members' subscriptions; and it would be edited by the Committee of Papers.

[4] After the takeover of the journal by the Royal Society, management decisions including negotiating with printers and booksellers, were still the task of one of the secretaries—but editorial control was exercised through the Committee of Papers.

Because two-fifths of the copies were distributed for free to the journal's natural market, sales were generally slow, and although back issues sold out gradually it would usually be ten years or more before there were fewer than 100 left of any given print run.

Also—though papers were rarely subjected to formal review—there is evidence of editorial intervention, with Banks himself or a trusted deputy proposing cuts or emendations to particular contributions.

Publishing in the Philosophical Transactions carried a high degree of prestige and Banks himself attributed an attempt to unseat him, relatively early in his presidency, to the envy of authors whose papers had been rejected from the journal.

In proposing a more limited membership, to protect the society's reputation, they also argued for systematic, expert evaluation of papers for Transactions by named referees.

[14] Sectional Committees, each with responsibility for a particular group of disciplines, were initially set up in the 1830s to adjudicate the award of George IV's Royal Medals.

Around 500 of these went to the fellowship, in return for their membership dues, and since authors now received up to 150 off-prints for free, to circulate through their personal networks, the demand for the Transactions through the book trade must have been limited.

[4] While expenditure was a worry for the treasurer, as secretary (from 1854), George Gabriel Stokes was preoccupied with the actual content of the Transactions and his extensive correspondence with authors over his thirty-one-year term.

The six sectional committees covered mathematics, botany, zoology, physiology, geology, and (together) chemistry and physics, and were composed of Fellows of the society with relevant expertise.

For a brief period between 1907 and 1914, authors were under even more pressure to conform to the society's expectations, due to a decision to discuss cost estimates of candidate papers alongside referees' reports.

[15] As the twentieth century came to a close, the editing of the Transactions and the society's other journals became more professional with the employment of a growing in-house staff of editors, designers and marketers.

Instead, the secretaries, Harrie Massey (physicist) and Bernard Katz (physiologist), were each assigned a group of Fellows to act as associate editors for each series ("A" and "B") of the Transactions.

Famous contributing authors include: 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.

[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.

[33] The protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" alludes to the older editions of the Philosophical Transactions, comparing them to the occult writings of earlier natural philosophers: Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought.The journal is also mentioned by the narrator in Chapter 6 of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells[34] Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all ambition.