Royal Society releases hundreds of historic peer-review reports to the public

Hundreds of peer-review reports dating from 1949 to 1954 have been released to the public by the UK’s national scientific academy. The Royal Society says that releasing the reports will allow researchers ‘to retrace the history of scientific peer-reviewing’.

Confidentiality laws meant that the peer review reports had to be kept private for 70 years. Following the expiry of that embargo, the 1600 newly-released reports are now available to view on the RS’s Science in the Making portal. The reports add to an archive of referee reports dating all the way back to 1831.