Einstein’s response to the anonymous reviewers’ critical comments:
“Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.
Respectfully,
P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.”
Apparently the formal process of peer reviewing wasn’t a thing until then.
> The present-day peer-review system evolved from this 18th-century process,[15] began to involve external reviewers in the mid-19th-century,[16] and did not become commonplace until the mid-20th-century.[17]
> While some medical journals started to systematically appoint external reviewers, it is only since the middle of the 20th century that this practice has spread widely and that external reviewers have been given some visibility within academic journals, including being thanked by authors and editors.[18][22] A 2003 editorial in Nature stated that, in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."[23] Nature itself instituted formal peer review only in 1967.[24]
The peer review process as known today only took off from the second part of the 20th century, but the article also says:
"...On 30 July, Tate replied that he regretted Einstein’s decision to withdraw the paper, but stated that he would not set aside the journal’s review procedure..."
What seems to imply the peer reviewing process was very much already in place since the early 1920-30's at least for the Physical Review.
Also according to historical record:[1]
"...We know that by the 1930s, peer review at the journal was more established. Ledger pages from the time contain the same basic information that we now store in our computer: date of receipt, date sent to a reviewer, date returned, date published or rejected. From these, we see that many papers were sent out for expert evaluation, but also that in many cases, the expert assigned to a manuscript was the Editor, John Tate. We also learn that many papers had no referee assigned to them, and that some of these were accepted and some were rejected. Thus during this period, peer review was growing and making a larger contribution, but decisions were still often made by the editors alone..."
Yes, this was a fascinating read all around, but raises as many questions about credit for gravitational waves as is a commentary on peer review or a historical footnote. Even now, there's no mention of Beck, Baldwin, or Jeffrey in the Wikipedia article on gravitational waves; the discussion about this incident is focused on Einstein and Rosen's paper and Robertson's relationship to it.
It is not quite clear to me what the author of this update (Martin Blume) is claiming. He says that Abraham Pais, in his biography of Einstein, reports him correcting the error before submitting it to the Physical Review. Blume notes that this contradicts Kennefick, and also Einstein's own note at the end of the 1936 paper. It would also, it seems to me, make nonsense of Robertson's review, and his subsequent correspondence with Tate on the matter. As far as I can tell, this casts doubt on Pais's version, but it is not clear to me that Blume sees it this way.
“Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.
Respectfully,
P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.”
Apparently the formal process of peer reviewing wasn’t a thing until then.