The first inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the United States was held on Tuesday, January 20, 1981, at the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. This was the first inauguration to be held on the building's west side. This was the 49th inauguration and marked the commencement of the first term of Ronald Reagan as President and of George H. W. Bush as Vice President. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger administered the presidential oath of office to Reagan, who placed his hand upon a family Bible given to him by his mother, open to 2 Chronicles 7:14. Associate Justice Potter Stewart administered the vice-presidential oath to Bush. At 69 years, 349 days of age on Inauguration Day, Reagan was the oldest person to assume the presidency until Donald Trump in 2017. While the inauguration was taking place, the 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran were released.

Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, peer review does not prevent publication of invalid research, and there is little evidence that peer review improves the quality of published papers. There are attempts to reform the peer review process, including from the fields of metascience and journalology. Reformers seek to increase the reliability and efficiency of the peer review process and to provide it with a scientific foundation.Alternatives to common peer review practices have been put to the test, in particular open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers, generally with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well, e.g., F1000, eLife, BMJ, Sci and BioMed Central.