Henry Oldenburg, Inventor of Peer Review

Henry Oldenburg.

I’ve had many research articles published in scientific journals, and each one of them was peer reviewed. This means the journal editor sent my manuscript to two or three experts to read it, comment on it, correct it, and judge it. I can’t say I loved having anonymous reviewers criticize my work, but the process did improve my papers. I’ve also reviewed hundreds of submitted manuscripts for journals, and those poor authors had to suffer my wrath. Interestingly, in my experience books undergo much less peer review than journal articles. None of the editions of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology that I was a coauthor on underwent any peer review. Perhaps Russ Hobbie’s first edition did; I don’t know.

How did all this reviewing get started? With any complicated development, it’s dangerous to point to one person as the inventor. Nevertheless, I’ll go out on a limb: The person who introduced peer review into science was Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677).

Oldenburg was born in Germany, but immigrated to England during the Interregnum: the time between the execution of king Charles I and the restoration of his son Charles II. Oldenburg was a friend of author John Milton and chemist Robert Boyle. When the Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, Oldenburg became its first secretary and was made the founding editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He began the practice of sending manuscripts to other scientists to evaluate their quality. This process of peer review was crucial for science back in the 17th century and continues to be essential for science in the 21st century. The lack of peer review for many pseudoscientific ideas being promoted today (climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, etc.) is causing all sorts of problems for our modern society.

Oldenburg did much more than establish peer review. He was, in many ways, the organizer of modern science. I’ve never managed to master any language other than English, so I’m particularly impressed that Oldenburg knew German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Latin. The Royal Society wisely put him in charge of foreign correspondence. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek—a scientist from the Netherlands known as the father of microscopy—would send Oldenburg rambling letters in Dutch describing his observations. Oldenburg translated and edited them, and published them in the Philosophical Transactions, making van Leeuwenhoek famous. Oldenburg also corresponded with Italian biologist Marcello Malpighi, the discoverer of capillaries, and Danish geologist Nicolas Steno, the founder of stratigraphy. Malpighi and Steno both published in Latin, the language of science at that time, so most scientists could read their work, but Oldenburg did translate their ideas into English, making them accessible to a wider society. Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens wrote letters in French to Oldenburg, who translated and published them. This list of scientists sounds like a Who’s Who of the scientific revolution.

Oldenburg didn’t write to just foreign scientists. He had an extensive correspondence with Englishmen Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, John Flamsteed, Edmond Halley, and Christopher Wren. Oldenburg wasn’t a great scientist himself, but he comes across as a central facilitator of 17th century science. I wonder what the scientific revolution would have looked like without him?

I love both science and writing. I wonder, sometimes, if Oldenburg might have had the best job in the world. He got to learn about the work of many famous scientists, and furthermore was able to influence the presentation of their results. Newton and Hooke were vastly better scientists, but they don’t come across as being happy. Oldenburg seems happy. I think I would have rather had Oldenburg’s job. I woulda hada lotta fun.

 Henry Oldenburg as a translator.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOiDLoCmB5U