Peer Review — An Insult to the Reader and to Society: Milton's View

Abstract

Peer review is, with near universality, now insisted upon as required pre-certification before a work can be published — allegedly, and questioningly, serving as a stamp of approval that assures the reader of its quality, validity, and accuracy. Today’s peer review is different in substance, but not in form, from the pre-publication censorship that so enraged Milton and led him to write his _Areopagitica_. The position he took nearly four hundred years ago reminds us that pre-publication restraint is the expres-sion of the interlinked fears of nonconformity, of the vulnerability of professional territorial turf, of disturbance of the status quo, and fear of independence of thought and resulting innovation. We are reminded that the principal target of intellectual suppression is the creative mind.