Foundation and early years The journal was established in 1853 as the
Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (
Q. J. Microsc. Sci., ). The founding
editors were
Edwin Lankester and
George Busk. The publisher of the early issues was Samuel Highley of
Fleet Street,
London, with
John Churchill and Sons (later J. & A. Churchill) taking over from 1856. The journal's original aims, as described in a preface to the first issue, were not limited to biology, but encompassed all branches of science related to the
microscope: Contributors to the first issue include
Thomas Henry Huxley,
Joseph Lister,
William Crawford Williamson, and
George Shadbolt. The contents of the early issues are diverse, and include original research articles, translations of papers published in other languages, transactions of the meetings of the Microscopical Society of London (later the
Royal Microscopical Society), and book reviews. The journal also published short notes and memoranda, aimed "to gather up fragments of information, which singly might appear to be useless but together are of great importance to science"; the editors encouraged non-specialist submissions to this section, considering that "there are few possessors of a Microscope who have not met with some stray fact or facts which, published in this way, may not lead to important results."
Under Ray Lankester and Edwin Goodrich After Edwin Lankester's retirement,
Ray Lankester remained an editor, with co-editors including E. Klein,
William Archer,
Joseph Frank Payne, and
W. T. Thiselton Dyer. From 1878 until 1920, he served as the sole editor, amassing a total of over fifty years as an editor of the journal. The journal flourished under his guidance, becoming one of the leading British science journals.
Oxford University Press took over as publishers in 1920.
The Company of Biologists and relaunch In 1946 or 1947,
George Parker Bidder, then the owner, gave the journal to The Company of Biologists, a company he had founded in 1925 in a successful bid to rescue the failing
British Journal of Experimental Biology. Initially, Oxford University Press remained the publishers on behalf of the Company of Biologists, but production was later transferred to
Cambridge University Press. After Pantin's retirement in 1960, the scope of the journal was refocused on the field of cytology, which the editors defined as "Everything that relates directly to the structure, chemical composition, physical nature, and functions of animal and plant cells, or to the techniques that are used in cytological investigations". Issues from 1853 are available online via the journal website and
HighWire Press as
PDFs, with a text version additionally available from 2000. Content over 12 months old is freely available, and all articles are available to readers in developing countries via the
Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative. Since 2004, authors have retained copyright of their material, licensing their contributions to the journal. == Scope and content ==