The peer review system, as we know it now, is a relatively recent achievement. It will still evolve to better fit the needs of science and society in the future.
Peer review, the procedure by which funders and journals seek external expert opinion to make decisions on which proposal to fund or manuscripts to publish, has become systematic only in the second half of the 20th century. Nature, for example, introduced systematic peer review in the 1970s1. Prior to that, editors saw no problem publishing contributions according to their own sole judgement, although in many cases some kind of unsystematic external expert opinion was sought. Famous is the case of the three 1953 papers linked to the structure of DNA, which were published without peer review. Even in 1975, news pieces in Nature described the practice as “so-called, peer review”, hinting at the fact it was somewhat unfamiliar to readers2.
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As to the origin of peer review, consensus among historians is converging towards a specific episode in the 1970s, when the opinion of peers was established as a more reliable and fairer way to assess the scientific merits of research proposals3. The episode refers to a US Congress hearing regarding the allocation of research funding at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Lawmakers wanted to justify the return on investment of the large funds they invested in science and specifically in fundamental science. There was a suspicion, which became more than a suspicion during the hearings, that NSF’s research programme directors held too much power in deciding what to support and what to cut and that the agency exercised little supervision over money expenditure.
Lawmakers wanted scientists to be held accountable for the use of public money. Scientists and the NSF wanted to keep their independence (and their funding). As a result, the NSF agreed to implement a more structured procedure to evaluate research proposals (that is, peer review), but lawmakers had to concede that only fellow scientists, not the public or lawmakers, could evaluate the technical validity of proposals.
After that episode, peer review under the condition of anonymity became a widely accepted safeguard procedure to weigh in the validity of scientific documents. It was adopted by funding agencies and journals for the evaluation of proposals and manuscripts.
Despite its detractors and inevitable criticisms, the peer review system has served the scientific community reasonably well in the past 70 years while both technology and publishing models have evolved through the advent of personal computers, the internet, preprint servers and the open-access movement.
What is important to emphasize is that academic refereeing practices have largely evolved in response to forces external to the scientific community, mainly in response to political scrutiny, even before systematic peer review was established4. By proxy, this signals voters’ change in sensibility towards the role of science and scientific institutions in society. Particularly concerning is the rise of the post-truth era, which echoes the rise of postmodernism in other aspects of society. In a nutshell, postmodernism is a philosophical and cultural movement that rejects anything that aims at homogenizing our views under a unified set of values; rather, it deconstructs reality into small pieces that anyone can adapt to their sensibility. For a discipline that claims objectivity and has developed a method for investigating and defining universal facts, this facet of postmodernism is a threat.
But what does peer review have to do with this? The current peer review practice contains at its core the notion of autonomy: the idea that scientists can evaluate themselves, correct their own mistakes, expel those who don’t play by certain rules of conduct, etc. Autonomy, however, brings with it what people might come to perceive as a sense of elitism and academic superiority. Moreover, when science becomes the justification for unpopular political decisions that encroach upon people’s way of life (for example, lockdown restrictions during Covid limiting freedom of movement; green technologies policies putting jobs at risk), science and scientific institutions inevitably start to be perceived as an oppressive centre of power to be challenged.
The limits of peer review have long been recognized, and important changes have been implemented or experimented with (for example, doubly anonymized process, publication of reviewers’ names, post-publication peer review). As the struggle between science and politics reaches an all-time high, there is now an opportunity to rethink peer review practices in the broader context of the evolving relationship between science and society.