Despite being coined only in the early 1970s, ‘peer review’ has become a powerful rhetorical concept in modern academic discourse, tasked with ensuring the reliability and reputation of scholarly research. Its origins have commonly been dated to the foundation of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, or to early learned societies more generally, with little consideration of the intervening historical development. It is clear from our analysis of the Royal Society's editorial practices from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries that the function of refereeing, and the social and intellectual meaning associated with scholarly publication, has historically been quite different from the function and meaning now associated with peer review. Refereeing emerged as part of the social practices associated with arranging the meetings and publications of gentlemanly learned societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such societies had particular needs for processes that, at various times, could create collective editorial responsibility, protect institutional finances, and guard the award of prestige. The mismatch between that context and the world of modern, professional, international science, helps to explain some of the accusations now being levelled against peer review as not being ‘fit for purpose’.

If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded. 1 Thus, Thomas Henry Huxley, in a lay sermon on intellectual progress delivered in January 1866, proclaimed one of the central roles of the scientific periodical: as a record of the progress of the sciences. By Huxley's time, Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society of London, was just one of many scientific journals issued by learned societies and commercial publishers. 2 The Royal Society's project to create a Catalogue of Scientific Papers had just finished indexing almost 1400 such journals from all over the world. 3 What made Philosophical Transactions unique, as Huxley knew, was its longevity. Other journals enabled more rapid publication, and other journals contained more specialist research, but no other journal had a back-run that could compare to Transactions. And since Transactions is still with us today, the length of its back-run remains unique: 350 years and still counting.Over those 350 years, scientific periodicals have performed many roles. As well as storing records of research for the future, they have enabled geographically dispersed scholars to communicate, and sometimes to coordinate, their research. They have helped to establish and police knowledge communities. They have served as currency in exchanges that built and maintained relationships between learned societies, and between individual researchers. They have always been part of an interlocking web of oral, manuscript and printed (and, recently, digital) forms through which knowledge and knowledge claims have been transmitted and translated between cultural, linguistic and disciplinary contexts. But, amid that array of communication tools, periodicals have come to be the dominant means by which scientists (or, increasingly, teams of scientists) gain credit for discoveries and build their reputations and careers. The editorial processes for selecting and evaluating papers for publication have become increasingly complex as the social stakes of publication have increased, and, with the professionalization of other fields of academic endeavour over the last century, the practices of science journals and their editors have informed the standards for scholarly publishing in non-scientific fields.The research printed in scientific periodicals has long been mined by historians of science, but communication practices have received more attention since the rise of constructivist accounts of natural knowledge in the 1970s. 4 Historians and sociologists of science have investigated the processes, both formal and informal, through which experimentally based knowledge was disseminated, and thus transformed into publicly acknowledged facts. The first scholarly journals (Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions, in 1665) are now well-establis...

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We have used the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT, see https:// credit.niso.org/) to describe the co-authors' various contributions to this project, and to acknowledge other people who were essential to research.

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