/ Journals

About our journals

 

Since the first issue of Philosophical Transactions in 1665, publishing has been at the heart of the Royal Society's mission to recognise, promote and support excellence in science, and to encourage the development and use of science, for the benefit of humanity. This year we are celebrating our 360th anniversary with a 360° view of publishing - past, present and future.

Our ten leading journals provide broad coverage of all science, specialise in cross disciplinary research, and are committed to high quality, open and ethical publishing. As a not-for-profit society publisher, any surplus we generate goes back into supporting and progressing the global scientific community by funding the activities of the Society.

Published articles by discipline 

We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world supporting the diverse breadth of scientific expertise on a global scale. 

Published articles by origin 

As a member of OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, we are committed to supporting open access as a means of maximising the dissemination and re-use of research outputs. Biographical Memoirs is our diamond open access journal. Two of our journals, Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology, are gold open access and we provide authors with the choice of open access in all of our hybrid journals. For 2026 we will be converting our eight hybrid journals to a Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to Open supports global access to research without shifting costs to authors and relies on continued library participation. If this is supported by the library community, there is potential that all of our published content for 2026 will be open access under a CC-BY license. 

Our Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme supports tens of thousands of researchers based in over 100 low- and middle-income countries and territories by providing free access to all journal articles and/or automatic APC waivers.

We advocate open science policies and support the research community with open science practices. 

We have spent over 360 years publishing innovative, multi-disciplinary scientific research from around the world. Those publishing with us join revolutionary authors such as Srinivasa Ramanujan, Kathleen Lonsdale, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Dorothy Hodgkins, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, to name but a few.

 

Discover more about what we offer

Our publishing process

Our rapid and personal author services are supported by our diverse expert community of editorial board members and peer reviewers. Discover more about our publishing process:

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