This article examines the evolution of peer review and the modern editorial processes of scholarly journals by analyzing a novel data set derived from the Royal Society’s archives and covering 1865-1965, that is, the historical period in which refereeing (not yet known as peer review) became firmly established. Our analysis reveals how the Royal Society’s editorial processes coped with both an increasing reliance on refereeing and a growth in submissions, while maintaining collective responsibility and minimizing research waste. By engaging more of its fellows in editorial activity, the society was able to establish an equilibrium of number of submissions per reviewer that was relatively stable over time. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the distribution of editorial work was significantly uneven. Our findings reveal interesting parallels with current concerns about the scale and distribution of peer review work and suggest the strategic importance of the management of the editorial process to achieve a creative mix of community commitment and professional responsibility that is essential in contemporary journals.

Conclusions Our findings show the pros and cons of community-based editorial processes in the age of handwritten and typed letters, weekly meetings, and print-on-paper publication. Having the editorial process so closely embedded in a society helped to organize the editorial process around journals and established a sense of collective responsibility for the journals and their contents. The prescreening role of the fellows who acted as communicators helped to outsource some evaluation work prior to what we now name the editorial process. Involving fellows as communicators, referees, and committee members allowed the distribution of risk in uncertain decisions among accountable fellows. This was only possible because fellows were socialized to certain community values, and for many of them, this included doing their best to protect the prestige of their society through their commitment in the editorial process of its journals. The significant challenge was the growth of submissions from outside the society. In the nineteenth century, most editorial decisions were being made by fellows about fellows; but after c.1900, most editorial decisions were being made by fellows about nonfellows. What began as “peer” evaluation had changed into something else: being accepted for publication signified acceptance by representatives of an elite national learned body of judges. The growth of external submissions also had consequences for the motivation of fellows who engaged in editorial processes. Reviewing and editorial work used to be an activity that was clearly for the benefit of the club to which one belonged; but by the twentieth century, it had become something that was for the benefit of a wider, more dispersed, less clearly identified community. The Society’s inability to expand the group of “active fellows” to keep the workload better distributed suggests that the benefits to members of editorial work were no longer sufficiently clear, amid the many other responsibilities competing for their time. The historical example of learned society publishing, including that of the Royal Society, has long been used to support calls for academics to take back the control of research journals (Harnad 1995; Fyfe et al. 2017; Tennant et al. 2017). Looking at the past should provoke reflection among those seeking to use digital communications technologies to create virtual communities aiming to self-organize editorial work, refereeing, and publication (e.g., Tennant et al. 2017), in order to recreate collegial dialogue and judgment (Hirschauer 2010), rather than distant trilateral negotiations between authors, referees, and editors (Myers 1985). Questions remain about how best to organize those communities and how to motivate members to carry out voluntary work, while keeping the pace of the complexity of the editorial work and increasing requests for responsibility and accountability (Fitzpatrick 2010). Embedding journals in responsible and accountable communities is in our opinion essential but not sufficient. First, the complex ecology of entities composing the scholarly communication landscape, including universities, media conglomerates, and learned society publishers, needs synergistic relations to explore these innovations more systematically (Squazzoni, Marušić, and Grimaldo 2017). Much more so than mid-nineteenth-century Fellows of the Royal Society, individual researchers now routinely engage with multiple scholarly communities and publishing organizations and may have to prioritize different interests in those different contexts. Unfortunately, competition and predation often prevail between these entities because their incentives, rewards, and priorities are misaligned (Edwards and Roy 2016; Bianchi et al. 2018). Second, responsibility and accountability require organizational processes that are often difficult to put in place outside conventional frameworks. But the hierarchies and role structures that are part of community embeddedness can also nurture old-boy-ism and implicit bias (or “group think”), and they encourage intellectual conservatism over innovation (Sigelman and Whicker 1987; Travis and Collins 1991). For instance, the decision of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2009 to revoke the National Academy members’ privilege of contributing and communicating manuscripts was intended to avoid members exploiting their position and subverting peer review (Kean 2009). The embeddedness of the Royal Society’s own journals has been gradually loosened since the 1960s: reforms in 1968 allowed the secretary editors to look beyond the Fellowship to find referees and another set of reforms in 1990 removed the requirement for all papers to pass the scrutiny of a Fellow before being submitted to the editorial process. Expanding the pool of referees was a pragmatic response to the problems of workload, while the introduction of a “direct submission” route was a successful attempt to attract a larger and wider pool of submissions, by (belatedly) addressing the failure of the Royal Society journals to reflect the international expansion in scientific research since c.1950. It was only in the 2010s that the Society, now highly conscious of the diversity and inclusion agenda, recast its revised editorial practices as demonstrating a commitment to the intellectual and moral value of involving a wider diversity of people and perspectives in the evaluation of research (Fyfe 2018b). But the result is that, though the journal editors continue to be Fellows, the close links between the journals and the fellowship have largely disappeared. To conclude, balancing the advantages of embedding journals within communities, with the drawbacks of a close community, remains a challenge. On the one hand, research hyperspecialization and the increasing multidisciplinarity of scientific collaboration have created a context in which community identities and boundaries are blurred and constantly changing. On the other hand, academic hypercompetition and the diffusion of perverse “publish or perish” incentives tend to transform the social embeddedness of academics only as a means to ensure publications, citations, and individual achievements.

Authors’ Note

Pierpaolo Dondio is now affiliated with School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland.

Acknowledgments We thank the staff in the library and publishing teams at the Royal Society for their generous assistance and some PEERE members for comments and suggestions on a preliminary version of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Our collaboration was supported by the COST Action TD1306 “New Frontiers of Peer Review” (PEERE). The historical research for this paper was supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, grant AH/K001841, “Publishing the Philosophical Transactions, 1665-2015.” ORCID iDs

Aileen Fyfe https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6794-4140 Flaminio Squazzoni https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6503-6077 Didier Torny https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6661-9680