The Problem with ‘Peer Review’
19th January 2026
n May 2017 a sculpture was displayed at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, believe it or not, in honour of the great secular-rational god Peer Review. The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — “Accept”, “Minor Changes”, “Major Changes”, “Revise and Resubmit” and “Reject”.
Peer review. What is it? Why does it matter? Where did it come from? How old is it?
A fairly solid academic article – Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965’, published in The Historical Journal 61 (2018), pp. 863-889 – begins with an untruth stated by the House of Commons committee on Science and Technology in 2011.
In one form or another, peer review has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research.
Always? Fact-check: False. It’s a lie, or an error. Apparently, many people think that peer review was invented in the 17th century. Not so.