But underneath it all is a set of persistent, structural problems that each era tried to solve with the tools it had. What would an editor, a reviewer, and an author experience at three moments in that history?
1665–1800s: Reputation as the only infrastructure
When Henry Oldenburg began circulating manuscripts among Fellows of the Royal Society, peer review was correspondence. The editor was gatekeeper, judge, and often the author's peer in the most literal sense. There was no anonymity, no structured evaluation form, no standard for what a review was supposed to accomplish.What held the system together was reputation. It worked only until the community grew too large for everyone to know everyone. At that point, reputation became noise. Editors had no formal mechanism for finding reviewers beyond their own networks. Reviewers had no way to signal availability or expertise. Authors had no visibility into where their work was. The exclusivity problem that defined this era would echo forward for centuries.
1950s–90s: Peer review becomes infrastructure
By the second half of the twentieth century, journals had multiplied, editorial boards had formalized, and the ad hoc correspondence model could no longer scale. Double-blind review emerged as a structural answer to reputation-as-bias. Standardized forms transformed what had been a personal exchange into a reproducible process.Peer review became infrastructure.
Peer review was also slow, paper-based, and geographically constrained. Editors gained process but lost proximity, managing workflows rather than conversations. Reviewers existed inside individual journal records with no consolidated view of their obligations. Authors entered a black box and waited.
2000s–2010s: Digital systems arrive, and so does the volume problem
Systems like ScholarOne moved peer review online. Invitation tracking, deadline management, revision cycles: all of it became auditable and searchable. Speed improved, but volume exploded.More submissions meant more reviewer requests, longer queues, and higher decline rates. Editors gained auditability but not visibility into who could take on work. Authors watched cycle times lengthen even as the underlying technology got faster. Digitization solved the paper problem and revealed the labor problem underneath it.
Today: ScholarOne Gateway
Gateway is a response to the accumulated weight of those eras, solving long standing pain points for editors, authors, and reviewers.The matching problem that opened in 1665 finally has a mechanism behind it. New reviewer search tools draw on what a reviewer has contributed across a publisher's journals, not just a single title, giving editors visibility to who is already doing meaningful work, not just who is technically qualified. Configurable reviewer preferences close the other side of that gap: reviewers can declare availability and topical focus so invitations arrive when they can act on them, rather than when the queue demands it.
The fragmentation that digitization compounded gets addressed through the unified publisher hub: a consolidated view across journals that lets reviewers exist as continuous contributors to a field rather than separate records inside each title. And for authors, who have largely been passengers in every previous iteration of this system, better-matched reviewers mean shorter cycles and more relevant feedback. The workflow improvements are real, but the structural change underneath them is that editors now have better tools to find the right reviewer in the first place.
What it represents is a system finally built around the people doing the work: not the journals, not the queues, not the correspondence chains they inherited.
What goes in the next capsule?
If someone buried a record of peer review in 2026 and opened it in 2040, what would they find? Probably a system still working through the tension between scale and quality, still asking whether the infrastructure serves the people inside it or the other way around.What would you put in the capsule? What does peer review need to get right in the next fifteen years — for editors, for reviewers, for authors — and what would you want the next generation of researchers to inherit?