Editing Academy (section)

===History of academic journals===
Among the earliest [[research journal]]s were the Proceedings of Meetings of the [[Royal Society]] in the 17th century. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial, and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for a new discovery to be announced as an [[anagram]], reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both [[Isaac Newton]] and [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz|Leibniz]] used this approach. However, this method did not work well. [[Robert K. Merton]], a sociologist, found that 92 percent of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72 percent in the 18th century, 59 percent by the latter half of the 19th century, and 33 percent by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals.

The Royal Society was steadfast in its unpopular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence. Many of the experiments were ones that we would not recognize as scientific today—nor were the questions they answered. For example, when the [[George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham|Duke of Buckingham]] was admitted as a [[Fellow of the Royal Society]] on June 5, 1661, he presented the Society with a vial of powdered "[[unicorn]] horn". It was a well-accepted 'fact' that a circle of unicorn's horn would act as an invisible cage for any [[spider]]. [[Robert Hooke]], the chief experimenter of the Royal Society, emptied the Duke's vial into a circle on a table and dropped a spider in the centre of the circle. The spider promptly walked out of the circle and off the table. In its day, this was cutting-edge research.