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.
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.
We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world supporting the diverse breadth of scientific expertise on a global scale.
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 from 2026 our eight subscription journals are open access through Subscribe to Open (S2O). Under S2O content is open access and there are no article processing charges to publish under a CC-BY licence.
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
- Explore our portfolio of scientific journals
- Join our valued author community and submit your work to us
- Access our content through Read and Publish agreements and Subscribe to Open
- Travel through 400 years of scientific history
- Discover our mission and values
- Browse our journal article collections
- Listen to talks from our growing online seminar series
- Take a look at our resources for early career researchers
- Enter our photography competition
- Get involved in our outreach programme
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:
Related content
History of scientific journals
360 years of scientific publishing.
Royal Society journal article collections
Subject collections bringing together research across the Royal Society journals
Royal Society journal seminar collections
Author seminars associated with recent impactful journal articles.
Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition
Celebrating the power of photography to communicate science.