Peer review, past, present… and future

Professor Aileen Fyfe FRSE

• 16 March 2026, 18:00 – 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Upcoming event Booking Recommended In-person Lecture Lent Term

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: Yes

Share:

• Tweet

Overview

Research evaluation is a familiar element of modern science, and peer review is one of the favoured ways of doing it. But peer review has not always been so central to academic reputations; nor has it always functioned as it now does. This lecture will draw upon my team’s research in the archives of the Royal Society of London to explore how evaluation has changed over the last 250 years, to explain the present crisis and to discuss options for the future.

The Royal Society has published scientific journals since 1665. It was one of the first institutions to develop written refereeing processes, which began to be used at the Philosophical Transactions in the 1830s and later at the Proceedings and other journals. The Society’s unrivalled archives shed light onhow decisions were made – and by whom, and why – before and after the introduction of written refereeing.

During the twentieth century, ‘peer-reviewed publications’ acquired a privileged status. The increasing importance assigned to refereeing accompanied professionalisation and increased competition. The growth of science, demographic changes and internationalization have also posed challenges for our ongoing use of an evaluation practice that originally developed in the context of a closed, gentlemanly community. What should the future of peer review look like?

Biography

Aileen Fyfe is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the history of scientific journals. Her research investigates the history of academic publishing from the seventeenth century to the present day. She was lead-author of A History of Scientific Journals: Royal Society publishing, 1665-2015 (2022, open access), and has written numerous articles investigating the financial models underpinning the production and circulation of scientific journals, their editorial and reviewing processes, and the role of learned society publishers. She is regularly invited to share her expertise with funders, policy makers and publishers’ trade associations, thus contributing to public and policy debates about the future of academic publishing. She was lead-author of the widely-cited briefing paper Untangling Academic Publishing: a history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research (20172, open access). Earlier in her career, she wrote about the history of science popularisation and publishing in nineteenth-century Britain, including books on the Religious Tract Society (2004) and steam-powered publishing (2012). Once upon a time, she studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge.

---

Location