As described in the introduction to a series of articles on scientific publishing in the French newspaper Le Monde recently, the scientific journal has become the marker of the scientific expertise. But this has not always been the case. At the end of the 18th century, academies and learned societies dominated the study of the natural world by a scientific elite. Academic journals were a relatively marginal element of this world, and sometimes even an object of pure and simple suspicion.Starting with the premise that publications associated with elite and professional science have largely escaped historical scrutiny, two historians of science (Alex Csiszar and Melinda Baldwin) tell us how things have changed. They advocate the idea that journals have never been a passive vessel rather, they have been a site where the rules of science themselves were debated and developed. Although they follow different paths, both books propose a genealogy of the editorial forms of science, and of the specific genre of the scientific journal (a new serial format). They complement each other; put together, they cover almost five centuries.