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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

In January 1861 John Tyndall, a physicist at London’s Royal Institution, submitted a paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The paper bore the title “On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction.” After testing the heat-retaining properties of several gases, Tyndall had concluded that some were capable of trapping heat, and thus he became one of the first physicists to recognize and describe that basis for the greenhouse effect. A month after its submission, the paper was read aloud at a meeting of the society, and several months after that, a revised version of the paper was in print.

That path from submission to revision and publication will sound familiar to modern scientists. However, Tyndall’s experience with the Philosophical Transactions—in particular, with its refereeing system—was quite different from what authors experience today. Tracing “On the absorption and radiation of heat” through the Royal Society’s editorial process highlights how one of the world’s most established refereeing systems worked in the 1860s. Rather than relying on anonymous referee reports to improve their papers, authors engaged in extensive personal exchanges with their reviewers. Such a collegial approach gradually lost favor but recently has undergone something of a resurgence.

George Gabriel Stokes and the Philosophical Transactions

Refereeing was not typical for scientific journals in 1861. Many commercial scientific publications, including Nature and Philosophical Magazine, accepted articles with little or no outside refereeing, and most journals on the European continent relied on the judgment of highly qualified editors to determine what would be accepted or rejected. British scientific societies often employed more involved review processes that gathered opinions from other experts in the paper’s field. Publication in the Philosophical Transactions conferred, if not the Royal Society’s endorsement, then at least its general approval, and the fellows of the Royal Society were eager to ensure that Transactions papers reflected well on their organization.

Papers submitted to the Transactions were routed to one of the society’s two secretaries, the de facto editors of the publication. The secretaries were eminent researchers who arranged refereeing and provided their own expert judgment on papers submitted for publication. One secretary handled the biological sciences, the other the physical sciences.

In 1861 the physical sciences secretary was George Gabriel Stokes, one of the most respected physicists in Victorian Britain. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the storied post once occupied by Isaac Newton, and made meaningful contributions to research on fluid dynamics and light. He was also a significant figure in the history of refereeing. When Stokes began his tenure as secretary in 1854, the Royal Society was still reeling from an intense public controversy about favoritism at the Transactions. To address such concerns, Stokes took on the task of standardizing refereeing for Transactions papers.

After receiving “On the absorption and radiation of heat,” Stokes arranged for two experts to review the paper. One was his closest friend, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), arguably the most important physicist in Britain. The other referee was Stokes himself. This was not unusual; Stokes had wide-ranging knowledge of physics research and often refereed papers in the physical sciences.

After a few weeks, Thomson returned a referee report to the Committee on Papers, the Royal Society group that made final decisions on which papers would be accepted. That report has unfortunately not survived, though Thomson’s correspondence with Stokes suggests that he recommended publication.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.9098/full/ [scitation.org]

Original Submission