> By the 1890s, members of the scientific community began envisioning a referee not as someone who merely made an expert judgment about the quality of a paper,

> By the 1890s, members of the scientific community began envisioning a referee not as someone who merely made an expert judgment about the quality of a paper, but as someone who had to protect the trustworthiness of the entire scientific literature by detecting bad work. This is key. Peer review today serves two distinct purposes: to provide feedback for an author to improve their work, and as a stamp of approval that is used in judging the author. However, the latter purpose affects the former, in that a review is no longer just input for the author to consider, but judgment that will impact their career, and whether their work will be made accessible to others in the first place. (I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub, which aims to provide a separate mechanism to obtain a "stamp of approval", in order to disentangle that step from review and publication. If anyone has contacts at an academic (preprint) publisher who might be open to incorporating it, do get in touch.)