Table 1.
Major innovations in peer review—a timeline.
| 1732 | Royal Society of Edinburgh uses peer review for the first time |
| 1893 | British Medical Journal adopts peer review |
| 1959 | Current Anthropology introduces Open Peer Commentary |
| 1964 | Nature introduces peer review |
| 1976 | Lancet introduces peer review |
| 1978 | Brain and Behavioral Sciences introduces Open Peer Commentary |
| 1991 | Launch of ArXiv |
| 1999 | British Medical Journal begins to reveal reviewer names to authors |
| 2000 | BioMed Central (BMC) adopts open review for all its medical journals |
| 2001 | Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics introduces two-stage review process in which papers are published as “discussion papers” before formal review |
| 2003 | First article on BMC Medicine |
| 2006 | First article on PLOS ONE using non-selective review |
| 2006 | Nature experiment in community review |
| 2007 | First article in Frontiers using non-selective interactive review and including names of editor and reviewers |
| 2007 | Nature launches commercial preprint server (Nature Precedings) |
| 2010 | Shakespeare Quarterly experiment in open review |
| 2011 | BMJ Group launches BMJ Open |
| 2012 | Launch of several new journals adopting open review (GigaScience, PeerJ, eLife, F1000 research) |
| 2012 | Nature Precedings ceases to accept new submissions |
| 2013 | Nature Genetics and Nature Climate Change offer double blind review |