Tough new standards on what constitutes a peer-reviewed journal should be enforced by governmental agencies, according to a Nobel prizewinning biochemist who claims that a “broken journal system” is destroying trust in science.
In an outspoken attack on the “incredibly profitable” but “completely unregulated” scientific publishing industry, Thomas Südhof, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, said he wanted to see US or European Union agencies establish minimum standards for journals that wish to describe themselves as “peer reviewed”.
Such guidelines should include journals having to publish reviewer comments alongside articles and to publicly list all the peer reviewers used every year “so the public can see the people they use are experts”, said Südhof, a German-born scientist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 with Randy Schekman and James Rothman for discoveries on how brain cells transmit information.
“You cannot sell a drug without facing regulation, but publishers can sell journals as ‘peer reviewed’ without any accountability or regulation,” Südhof told Times Higher Education at the July 2026 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
“I see this the same way as drugs, which are regulated by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] in America. We need an FDA for journals; so we need the European Union or the US government to provide regulatory framework for scientific publishing,” argued Südhof, who has been based at US universities since the mid-1980s.
