The broader institutions around academia have been around since at least the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660. That’s usually the age I would put the rough institutions surrounding academia.
Royal Society in 1660 and current academia are very different beasts. For example the current citations/journal’s game is pretty new phenomenon. Peer-review wasn’t really a thing 100 years ago. Neither complex grant applications.
I thought peer-review had always been a core part of science in some form or another. I think you might be confusing external peer-view and editorial peer-review. As this Wikipedia article says:
The first peer-reviewed publication might have been the Medical Essays and Observationspublished by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1731. The present-day peer-review system evolved from this 18th-century process,[5] began to involve external reviewers in the mid-19th-century,[6] and did not become commonplace until the mid-20th-century.[7]
Peer review became a touchstone of the scientific method, but until the end of the 19th century was often performed directly by an editor-in-chief or editorial committee.[8][9][10]Editors of scientific journals at that time made publication decisions without seeking outside input, i.e. an external panel of reviewers, giving established authors latitude in their journalistic discretion. For example, Albert Einstein’s four revolutionary Annus Mirabilispapers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physikwere peer-reviewed by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien, both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of these papers. On another occasion, Einstein was severely critical of the external review process, saying that he had not authorized the editor in chief to show his manuscript “to specialists before it is printed”, and informing him that he would “publish the paper elsewhere”.[11]
It’s true that external peer-review is recent, which I do think is a significant shift. But I would still think that the broader institution of peer-review is basically as old as science.
It’s a huge difference whether the reviewer is some anonymous person unrelated to the journal or whether it’s an editor in chief of the journal itself. I don’t think it’s appropriate to call the latter peer-review (there are no “peers” involved), but that’s not important.
Editor in chief has a strong motivation to have a good quality journal. If he rejects a good article, it’s his loss. On the contrary, anonymous peer have stronger motivation to use this as an opportunity to promote (get cited) his own research than to help journal curate the best science.
Let me try to rephrase the shift I see in science. Over the 20th century, science became bureaucraciesed, the process of “doing science” was largely formalised and standardised. Researchers obsess about impact factors, p-values, h-indexes, anonymous peer reviews, grants, currents...
There are actual rules in place that determine formally whether you are “good” scientist. That wasn’t the case over the most of the history of the science.
Also the “full-time” scientist who never did any other job than academy research was much less common in the past. Take Einstein as an example.
Oh, I think we both definitely agree that science has changed a lot. I do also think that it still very clearly has maintained a lot of its structure from its very early days, and to bring things back to John’s top level point, it is less obvious that that structure would redevelop if we were to give up completely on academia or something like that.
The broader institutions around academia have been around since at least the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660. That’s usually the age I would put the rough institutions surrounding academia.
Royal Society in 1660 and current academia are very different beasts. For example the current citations/journal’s game is pretty new phenomenon. Peer-review wasn’t really a thing 100 years ago. Neither complex grant applications.
I thought peer-review had always been a core part of science in some form or another. I think you might be confusing external peer-view and editorial peer-review. As this Wikipedia article says:
It’s true that external peer-review is recent, which I do think is a significant shift. But I would still think that the broader institution of peer-review is basically as old as science.
It’s a huge difference whether the reviewer is some anonymous person unrelated to the journal or whether it’s an editor in chief of the journal itself. I don’t think it’s appropriate to call the latter peer-review (there are no “peers” involved), but that’s not important.
Editor in chief has a strong motivation to have a good quality journal. If he rejects a good article, it’s his loss. On the contrary, anonymous peer have stronger motivation to use this as an opportunity to promote (get cited) his own research than to help journal curate the best science.
Let me try to rephrase the shift I see in science. Over the 20th century, science became bureaucraciesed, the process of “doing science” was largely formalised and standardised. Researchers obsess about impact factors, p-values, h-indexes, anonymous peer reviews, grants, currents...
There are actual rules in place that determine formally whether you are “good” scientist. That wasn’t the case over the most of the history of the science.
Also the “full-time” scientist who never did any other job than academy research was much less common in the past. Take Einstein as an example.
Oh, I think we both definitely agree that science has changed a lot. I do also think that it still very clearly has maintained a lot of its structure from its very early days, and to bring things back to John’s top level point, it is less obvious that that structure would redevelop if we were to give up completely on academia or something like that.