The bedrock of all science is data. The most
beautiful idea in science is worth nothing
without the data, the observations, the experiments
to back it up.
Having a journal where you could submit a
paper, have it properly reviewed, and then
there was a record of what you had done, really
clarified how science works.
This is one of the most significant steps
in the history of all science.
"I think one of the most important things
the Royal Society ever did, and it did it
right at its beginning, was to invent the
scientific journal - the Philosophical Transactions
- publishing articles describing the work.
They [scientists] could get their work published,
they were 'owners' of it, there was a date
on it so that they got priority."
"It's still important now."
"Exactly! Isn't that interesting. That's basically
the same thing that we have now. All the tens
of thousands of scientific journals, they
publish regularly, they are dated, they are
peer reviewed - it's all exactly the same model."
"When you're competing for a result, you want
to be the one who got it first, and that means
getting it in the journal first. So it still
holds a lot of importance in terms of motivation
to getting out good, robust science."
"That's exactly the same in my field too."
In particle physics, in particular, we're very, very stringent when we analyse our data
about whether we say we've discovered something.
It means that we want to be totally sure that
what we're saying is reliable.
"I work on the ATLAS experiment which already
has more than 3,000 people. There's another
experiment called the CMS experiment on the
LHC collider, also with many thousands of
people. We are essentially doing the same
physics programme, and that is done on purpose.
It's because if one of us were to make a claim
of something really extraordinary we need
to be confirmed by the other experiment. Also,
it helps with friendly competition. You don't
drag your feet so much when you know there's
somebody across the room who is also doing things as quickly as you are."
"So Emily, this is the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society recording when Philosophical
Transactions was established. They ordered
that the Philosophical Transactions, that's
the journal, to be composed by Mr Oldenburg."
The Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry
Oldenburg, played a key role. I suspect he
thought inventing the journal might reduce
his workload to some extent. Instead of acting
as the spider in the middle of the web connecting
everybody, matters could be dealt with by
a regular publication of a journal where the
observations and data were set out.
[Paul Nurse reading] "'Printed the first Monday
of every month' - it was a very regular publication.
'If there is sufficient matter for it' - so
if they didn't have it then they wouldn't
publish it. And 'That the track be licensed
by the Council of the Society' - in other
words, it should be acceptable for publication.
What's in there would be peer reviewed, that
was the origin for the peer review."
What peer review can do is eliminate the rubbish,
but if you're going for a high-profile journal
then a peer reviewer will be making judgements
about how interesting it is. Sometimes they
don't see that it is interesting even if the
science is quite good. The fact that we've
got a range of journals does mean that research
can get out there eventually, as long as it's
sound.
"In particle physics we have a rule that if
we want to make a discovery there's a 'five-sigma'
significance on it. So five-sigma makes it
safe before we go ahead and we publish. Coming
back to how it's done in your field, for example,
your Nobel Prize-winning work. You must have
wanted to be sure that it was correct before
you announced it. How many times and ways
did you do the measurements before you were
convinced?"
"The first observations were extremely exciting,
but they were insufficient for us to be sure
it was right. For the succeeding months after
that, we were doing all sorts of further experiments
that ended up with a very solid result. When
we published it, we were pretty certain that we were right."
"That's your personal five-sigma." "It's my personal five-sigma."
"This is the first Philosophical Transactions,
volume I. Very exciting. This is the very
first pages of the very first journal."
It was the beginning of peer review because
Council had to look at it, but it took a while
for the whole process to get in place.
[Paul Nurse reading] "'Philosophical Transactions...Undertaking,
Studies, and Labours..of the Ingenious in
many considerable parts of the world', great
language anyway! 'An account of the improvement
of optic glasses...'"
"A real distinction between the sort of thing
you're doing and what my lab is doing, is
once we've published people are less likely
to say 'that's the end of the story', than
they are with you. When the Higgs boson papers
came out that was essentially established.
In our case, we do everything we can within
the lab, but other people will take that idea
and test it and poke it and do other sorts
of experiments, and approach it in a different
way. So the peer review continues after publication
in a more extended way, than perhaps in your field."
We are going through a revolution in how we
publish and we will see different ways of
publishing - open access and electronic publishing.
All of these things are interesting and change
the way that we do things. But fundamentally,
it is based on the principles that we used
to establish Philosophical Transactions, the
journal invented by the Royal Society, in
1665.
