Some notes on the new venues for scientific discussion

• The printing press: Note how Copernicus and Galileo used it to disseminate their views; and how the churches try to control that process by such items and the Index of Forbidden Books.
• The role of Jesuits in Jesuit centers of learning between 1550 and 1615. Their colleges were adopted everywhere as models for secular education, e.g, the so-called public schools of England
• Universities remained very underfunded and very much under the control of clerics, both protestant and catholic; hence real innovation took place in the [royal and civic] academies

It was academies supported by royal patronage or by the "dilettantes" (that is educated members of the aristocracy and new business classes who enjoyed scholarship, scholars and who were ready to use their resources to support both). Typically these people met at monthy sessions at which members read and discussed papers. The papers were often printed and circulated to other learned societies throughout Europe. Hence many early scholar journals began as the Correspondence of the Royal Society for... and some still circulate under the title Sitzungungsbericht der Akademie der Wissenschaft [=Report on the meeeings of the academy of science]