At the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in July 2026, Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof (Physiology or Medicine, 2013) publicly called for government regulation of scientific journals, arguing that peer review currently operates with no external accountability. Speaking to Times Higher Education, Südhof described academic publishing as “the largest non-regulated industry in the world” and proposed that the European Union or the United States government create a regulatory framework for it — comparing the idea directly to the pharmaceutical industry’s oversight by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
What Südhof said
Südhof’s core argument, as reported by Times Higher Education, is that publishers are allowed to market journals as “peer reviewed” without any external body verifying what that label actually means in practice. In his words: “You cannot sell a drug without facing regulation, but publishers can sell journals as ‘peer reviewed’ without any accountability or regulation.” He went on to say: “I see this the same way as drugs, which are regulated by the FDA,” concluding that “we need an FDA for journals; so we need the European Union or the US government to provide regulatory framework for scientific publishing.”
Beyond the regulatory framing, Südhof proposed two concrete changes to how journals operate: publishing reviewer comments alongside articles, and publicly listing all peer reviewers annually so that, in his words, “the public can see the people they use are experts.”
Why he singled out COPE
Südhof’s remarks were explicitly a vote of no confidence in the publishing industry’s existing self-regulatory structures, and he named the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) specifically. He dismissed it as “a very self-serving organisation which is mainly there to protect publishers.” That is a sharp characterization of a body that CASRAI’s own reference material treats as the field’s default authority on editorial and publication-ethics guidance — see our explainers on COPE’s Core Practices and COPE’s decision flowcharts for what that self-regulatory model actually covers today, and where it stops. COPE is a membership organization funded largely by publisher and journal dues; it issues guidance and flowcharts for editors but has no statutory enforcement power over its members, which is precisely the gap Südhof’s proposal is aimed at.
The PubPeer and research-integrity-sleuth argument
In the same remarks, Südhof also criticized anonymous post-publication commentary on platforms such as PubPeer, arguing that anonymous “sleuths” have fueled anti-science sentiment and, in his characterization, “destroyed careers and destroyed valuable data to an enormous degree” by pursuing minor errors as though they were major misconduct. Times Higher Education reported that he drew a comparison to the historical persecution of Galileo. This is a notably different critique from his regulatory proposal — one aimed at under-accountability in peer review, the other at what he sees as over-reach in informal post-publication scrutiny — and the two arguments sit in tension with each other: greater institutional accountability for journals is generally the same goal that platforms like PubPeer and post-publication review are trying to serve through non-governmental means.
Context: how journals and publishers currently self-regulate
Südhof’s critique lands in a publishing-integrity landscape that already has several overlapping voluntary mechanisms, none of which carries government enforcement power:
- COPE provides Core Practices and case-by-case guidance to editors, but membership and compliance are voluntary.
- NISO’s peer review terminology work (ANSI/NISO Z39.106) standardizes how journals describe their review models (single-blind, double-blind, open peer review, cascading peer review), which addresses transparency of process but not enforcement of quality.
- Retraction infrastructure, including Retraction Watch‘s public database and NISO’s CREC recommended practice for retraction notices, creates after-the-fact visibility into failures, not upfront verification.
- Individual publishers vary widely in how much of the review process they disclose, from fully open reviewer reports to fully anonymous single-blind review, a spread documented in CASRAI’s comparison of single-blind, double-blind, and open peer review.
A statutory “FDA for journals” would be a materially different kind of intervention than any of these: it implies a government body with authority to approve, audit, or sanction journals directly, rather than a voluntary industry association issuing guidance. As of this writing, Südhof’s comments are a public call to action from an individual laureate at a conference, not a formal proposal before any legislature or regulatory agency, and no funder, government body, or major publisher has announced plans to act on it.
What this means for research administrators
For research administrators and institutional research offices, the practical relevance is less about whether a literal government regulator for journals materializes — that would require legislative action and is not imminent — and more about the underlying pressure it reflects: increasing scrutiny of whether “peer reviewed” is a meaningful, verifiable label, and growing institutional interest in reviewer transparency and peer review fraud prevention. Institutions that already track journal-level integrity signals (retraction history, COPE membership status, review-model disclosure) as part of researcher publication-venue vetting are, in effect, already doing informally what Südhof’s proposal would centralize formally.
Frequently asked questions
Did Thomas Südhof actually call for a government regulator for journals?
Yes. Speaking at the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in July 2026, Südhof told Times Higher Education that the European Union or the U.S. government should create a regulatory framework for scientific publishing, explicitly comparing it to the FDA’s regulation of drugs.
Did he criticize COPE by name?
Yes. He called COPE “a very self-serving organisation which is mainly there to protect publishers,” as part of a broader argument that the publishing industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
Has any government or regulatory body responded to the proposal?
Not as of this writing. This is a public statement from an individual Nobel laureate at a conference, not a formal regulatory proposal, and no legislative or regulatory process is known to be underway in response to it.
What did Südhof propose journals do differently?
Beyond government oversight, he proposed that journals publish reviewer comments alongside articles and publicly list their peer reviewers annually.
This article is based on reporting by Times Higher Education (published July 13, 2026). Quotations are as reported by that outlet.
