The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665–1965

Abstract

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’.

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

“…Around the same time, Denis de Sallo published the first issue of Journal des Sçavans , and both of these journals were first published in 1665 ( Manten, 1980; Oldenburg, 1665; Zuckerman & Merton, 1971). With this origin, early forms of peer evaluation emerged as part of the social practices of gentlemanly learned societies ( Kronick, 1990; Moxham & Fyfe, 2017; Spier, 2002). The development of these prototypical scientific journals gradually replaced the exchange of experimental reports and findings through correspondence, formalizing a process that had been essentially personal and informal until then.…”

“…As mentioned above, there is an increasing quantity and quality of research that examines how publication processes, selection, and peer review evolved from the 17th to the early 20th century, and how this relates to broader social patterns ( Baldwin, 2017a; Baldwin, 2017b; Fyfe et al , 2017; Moxham & Fyfe, 2017). However, much less research critically explores the diversity of selection of peer review processes in the mid- to late-20th century.…”

Know Your Enemy: Peter Chalmers Mitchell, British Military Intelligence and the Understanding of German Propaganda in the First World War

“…Publishers of specialist scientific books, meanwhile, commonly sought outside specialist advice before publication by 1900. 66 Even if the form of scrutiny varied, however, Chalmers Mitchell's scientific work required justification before peers. By contrast, his War Office superior noted that the report was 'issued as compiled, without any censorship or alteration by other hands'.…”

Managing the Growth of Peer Review at the Royal Society Journals, 1865-1965

“…According to recent estimates, about 2.5 million articles are published each year in academic journals across the world, with numbers growing about 3 percent a year (Ware and Mabe 2015;Publons 2018). At the heart of the contemporary system of academic publishing lies the process of peer review, which has become a central mechanism in establishing the credibility of scholarly journals and the reliability of scientific knowledge claims (Siler and Strang 2017;Tennant et al 2017;Moxham and Fyfe 2018;Grimaldo, Marušić, and Squazzoni 2018;Horbach and Halffman 2018). The growing prominence of peer review in advising both editorial and grant-making decisions has led to increasing scrutiny of the process in recent decades.…”

“…The Royal Society is the publisher of the world's longest-running scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1665 (Fyfe, McDougall-Waters, and Moxham 2015). Written referees' reports have been part of its editorial process since 1832 (Csiszar 2016(Csiszar , 2018Moxham and Fyfe 2018). A vast amount of information about the editorial process survives in manuscript in the London archive, but this is the first time a digitized data set has been available for analysis.…”