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Henry Oldenburg was an immigrant to Britain. Born in Germany, Henry Oldenburg began his career as a tutor. As a tutor, he traveled Europe widely, meeting learned men, and finally settled in London. In 1660, the Royal Society was formed in London to promote "natural philosophy." What is "natural philosophy"? Those days the word "natural philosophy" meant what we call science today. Oldenburg was selected as the first secretary of the society. The members of the society were mainly university professors, medical doctors, and enthusiastic people. The members of the society started meeting frequently to discuss among themselves. Members who could not participate in these meetings would send letters to the society's address. Henry Oldenburg was requested to read out these letters in the meeting. The job was not easy- reading out letters of so many people. But Oldenburg used to do it with efforts and served as an intermediary who sent the comments of society members to correspondents. That was the beginning of the peer-review process.

Although society paid Oldenburg for his secretarial duties, financially, he was not doing very well. One day an idea struck him- what about turning these scientific transactions as a money-making venture. Oldenburg decided to publish selected letters, articles read at the Royal Society meetings. That's how the Philosophical Transactions, the world's first periodical or journal, was born. The first volume was 16 pages long and had ten short articles. It was published in March 1665 and contained materials like whale watching in the Bermudas, making of optical glass, and the performance of a pendulum watch at sea. Though 1200 copies of the periodical were sold, it made very little money- but it opened a new horizon for the scientific world. Subsequently, many landmark articles got published in this journal in the first few years, which included Isaac Newton's first publication, on prism experiments. The Philosophical Transactions is still being published regularly and can be accessed here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstl . Thus, the Philosophical Transactions is the world's first and longest-running scientific journal. Today about 30,000 peer-reviewed journals are pumping out more than 2 million articles a year. But let's not forget the man who pioneered the process of peer review and gave the scientific world the concept of "Journal"