The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

arXiv was the first major preprint server, a practical Internet solution for a community seeking to exchange findings in areas like high-energy physics, particle physics, and astrophysics, all of which were growing at a rapid rate at the time due to machine-readable outputs and new sensor abilities. First housed at Los Alamos, it moved to Cornell for a time before spinning out as an independent no...

The history of science and tech is at some level a history of fabulists — people who imbued new technologies with magical powers of one sort or another, and others who dethroned the magicians and seers with empirical evidence. Now, physicists are actively asking if freewill is an illusion, and if the laws of physics are so deterministic that our consciousnesses are themselves an illusion. Now, we’...

Various ideologies have captured the handful of leaders atop the major AI firms currently calling for a slowdown in development — effective altruism, long-termism, Singularitarianism. The way these firms are whipsawing society is notable, and the superficiality of the leadership at these firms alarming. The utopian/dystopian fantasy world their ideologies has created — high hopes, disassociation f...

A recent press release from Springer Nature — gussied up to pretend it was a “white paper” representing “findings” and pushed right out through Research Information, where press releases go for release — provided a litany of incentives being pursued by the author-pays Gold OA publishers these days: Citations Downloads Attention However, these are not reliable incentives. Some work against OA publi...

We have a chapter in our book (“Trapped in the Tech Shrine”) about how scientific publishers became habituated to taking publishing and business advice from technology vendors. It became so entrenched that some might wonder who’s in charge. Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a palpable tech backlash against: Big Tech oligarchs Data centers Techno-authoritarians Lawsuits are everywhere as ext...

Today, we want to talk about Anthony Fauci, and our role in making life difficult for him — and, beyond his current travails, for society at large. In 2021, healthcare expert Paul Keckley noted five flaws in the response to Covid-19, three of which ended up at our doorstep: Covid-19 science has been compromised by political self-interests The influence of social media has been underestimated The s...

Colette Delawalla is the Founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science (SUFS), an organization that has been at the heart of our national — and now international — defense of independent science as an independent truth-seeking pursuit. With the organization recently notching a win by getting the proposed OMB funding rules — which would have given political appointees discretion over spending decisions,...

OA publishing and social media gave pseudoscience information a business model, but how do those people actually sell and fulfill products? The media keep missing this story, focusing on the products and not the businesses, as we found with a recent WIRED story about “natural” alternatives to Adderall. It’s not that they’re pushing these as much as how easily they’re able to push them in the first...

We’re back from our first signings, and we have a few stories to share. The signings occurred prior to the book’s official publication date, creating some extra interest but also some challenges the bookstores helped us navigate. Overall, it was a great experience, getting better and better as we settled in and got used to the format. The people we met were all fantastic and interesting. The store...

In 2025, Anita Say Chan’s book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future , was published by the University of California Press. This led to a review here , and we became immediate fans of her insights and research trajectory. We also conducted an email interview with Chan back in June 2025, before we were any good at podcasting. That interview is absolutely rive...

We’re finally in the long-awaited tunnel to people buying and reading our book. It seems like forever, yet the book also strikes us as more relevant than ever. As with most things set into motion, the path has contained some surprises. One was that the initial publication date (July 21st) was pushed back to August 4th due to supply chain issues. However, three book signings had already been schedu...

Quantification as proxy for qualification of scientific and academic publications has been around for a very long time.  Today, we touch a little on the history of bibliometrics and scientometrics, but not as much as in the chapter in our book , where we go into the metrics of it all over the last 30 years. Griping about the JIF has been going on for decades. “Responsible use” or “don’t count it”...

We turned the manuscript for our book in almost a year ago now, but we were working feverishly on it around this time given that MAHA was busy undermining vaccine science even then. Now, a year later, how is our book looking? More or less relevant? In this episode, we take a walk of some key chapter to find out: Trapped In the Tech Shrine An Ad Model for Scientific Claims   Everything Counts, Noth...

We’ve been doing our podcast for nearly a full year, starting right as we were putting our pencils down from writing the book . We didn’t know quite what to expect, but we were excited to try something new, and we learned how to do a podcast, which felt like an accomplishment. We’ve also has some great interviews: AI experts (the professor kind) Librarians (who serve communities of students and fa...

Today we take a deep dive into a fake paper involving Eric Topol, one of the most prominent names in what we have to call “mainstream medicine” today. We’re going to offer our second opinion on what we know to be his misdiagnosis of what should be done to cure this “problem.” A clue to the real source of the problem is the only “real” thing about the paper — the DOI. CrossRef has failed to realize...

This week, guest host Michael Magoulias takes the reins to conduct a lighthearted interview of your intrepid authors, partly to take the sting out of this being tax day in the US. Michael has worked in scholarly publishing at the University of Chicago Press and is currently at Elsevier. He’s a trenchant observer of the scene and mutual friend. We tackle some introductory questions and then . . . t...

Susan Wise Bauer is a historian and author of The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy . I reviewed her book a few weeks ago, and Joy attended a talk she gave William & Mary. Her engaging book seems to come from an era when the history of science existed outside of politics, restoring a calm sense of historical perspective much needed in these trou...

Technology and media have become entangled and confused, so much so that the free speech of “no, thanks, not for us” is now called “censorship” and discussing public officials or people on the public payroll in accountable roles is being equated to “doxxing.” Meanwhile, it’s becoming clearer AI isn’t about knowledge, it’s about power. Media manipulation is what tech has become all about — from soc...

Today, we’re joined by Amanda Licastro, Head of Digital Scholarship Strategies and Visiting Associate Professor in English at Swarthmore College. Amanda recently participated in one of Rick Anderson’s debates at the Researcher to Reader conference in London. This one was titled, “Resolved: AI Tools Will Provide a Net Benefit to Scholarly Communication.” Amanda took the side of opposing that statem...

A recent episode of Paris Marx’s “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast featured Tim Schwab, author of the 2023 book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire . Recent revelations about Gates and Jeffrey Epstein have led to a reckoning at the Gates Foundation, making Schwab’s book more relevant and causing us to pause and revisit the role of the Gates Foundation and funders in...

John Wiley & Sons is at it again with its “date anyone with a cute AI” approach, announcing yesterday a deal with OpenEvidence (OE). This is nothing new for Wiley, a company that seems more infatuated with tech than it is with science and scholarship, a massive departure from its roots. OE is certainly happy to make the deal, but not for the quality of the content. Rather, it keeps their targe...

The last 25 years in scientific publishing has been about privileging technology-backed insurgents — business models, philosophies, belief systems, information theories. Natural science empowered by digital tools flipped to “digital science” at the expense of funding for natural science. Things are more complicated now in the sciences. Insurgents are coming from all directions, so we have to disti...

Carl Rhodes is Professor of Business and Society at The University of Technology Sydney Business School. Carl researches the relationship between liberal democracy and contemporary capitalism. Martina Linnenluecke is an internationally recognized scholar who conducts research on corporate adaptation and resilience to global climate change. She is also at The University of Technology Sydney Busines...

Maxwell K. Riggsbee, Jr., is a technologist currently specializing in developing machine learning systems around content serving US government policy-makers and related stakeholders via his company Gadget Software.  Max is also well-known for the cartoons he puts out on LinkedIn. Inspired by his love of 19th century political cartoons, these are timely, well-designed encapsulations of current even...

Earlier this week, Ben Collins, the owner of The Onion, was interviewed on Kara Swisher’s “On” podcast. The interview raised some core questions about the digital information age and how we in scientific publishing are handling it so far. Collins is from Massachusetts. His mother is a librarian, and he initially pursued a sports journalism career. In 2024, he became CEO of a company called Global...