Scientific Societies and the First Journals

Science in the 1600s became a shared enterprise through new institutions. In London, a group of natural philosophers met in November 1660 to found a society for experimental learning, chartered by Charles II as the Royal Society in 1662. Its motto, Nullius in verba (take nobody's word for it), expressed a demand that claims be tested. In 1665 the Society's secretary Henry Oldenburg began Philosophical Transactions, a journal reporting experiments, months after the Journal des sçavans first appeared in Paris.

In 1666 the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert founded the Académie royale des sciences, whose members received royal pensions, linking science to state power. These bodies created norms of witnessed experiments, correspondence and peer criticism, though membership was largely restricted to elite men. Their model of organized, public knowledge became a template for the Enlightenment's academies and learned societies across Europe and America.