Republic Of Letters

The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1] These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic... The first known occurrence of the term in its Latin form (Respublica literaria) is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini dated July 6, 1417;[3] it was used increasingly in the 16th and 17th, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals... There are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's Republic.[5] Part of the difficulty in determining its origin is that, unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters

• The Royal Society of London primarily promoted science, which was undertaken by wealthy gentlemen acting independently... It played an international role to adjudicate scientific findings, and published the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
• The familiar functions of the scientific journal—registration (date stamping and provenance), certification (peer review), dissemination, and archiving—were introduced at inception by Philosophical Transactions. The beginnings of these ideas can be traced in a series of letters from Henry Oldenburg to Robert Boyle:[9]
  • [24 November 1664] "We must be very careful as well of regist'ring the person and time of any new matter, as the matter itselfe, whereby the honor of the invention will be reliably preserved to all posterity" (registration and archiving)
  • [3 December 1664] "...all ingenious men will thereby be incouraged to impact their knowledge and discoverys" (dissemination)
  • The council minutes of 1 March 1665 made provisions for the tract to be revised by members of the council of the Royal Society, providing the framework for peer review to eventually develop, becoming fully systematic as a process by the 1830s.

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