The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

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...

PJ Puterbaugh’s skills exist at the intersection of art and science. Working as a painter and portraitist, years ago she found herself utilizing her abilities to help people by becoming a forensic artist. This meant certifying with the International Association for Identification (IAI) and becoming a Certified Forensic Artist. PJ works by assisting various law enforcement agencies with John and Ja...

Reading about Skylar Hughes is like reading about the early days of a superstar. A ballerina, a young academic powerhouse, and a community and psychological researcher for years already, Skylar went from high school in Georgia to attending Duke University, her dream at the time.  She worked as a fact-checker at CNN, and caught our eye with her TEDxDuke talk about social norms around truth. Since t...

“Disintermediation” was a hot buzzword during the early days of disruption thinking, but it never really occurred. Instead, the platform era ushered in new forms of intermediation based on advertising incentives and deregulation, making the current environment far less accountable and far more about exploitation. Markets depend on middlemen, as do information economies. The health of markets and i...

Rick Anderson, the University Librarian at Brigham Young University (BYU), joins us today. Rick serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards and is a regular contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen. He has served as president of NASIG and SSP, groups that span from libraries to publishers Also, he and Kent are not related, even if people often misattribute things between them. Late last year, Ric...

To close out 2025, we’ve decided to focus on a few related topics — incentives, norms, rules, and the customer you choose. Scientific and scholarly publishing has embraced misaligned incentives by making information producers the primary customers, causing the norms and rules of the game to warp and even break. What might happen if we reorient ourselves around information consumers? What norms mig...

For a variety of reasons we explore in the podcast, the OA bubble is not arriving in the AI era as something as all-encompassing or healthy as imagined — in fact, it appears to be deflating and is certainly dirtier than expected. It also does not possess sufficient surface tension to repel elements of the AI bubble from mixing in — OA papers with OA citations and text are often found, and many mor...

Today, we’re talking with Elizabeth Jacobs, Professor Emerita in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Arizona. She retired in 2024 to help found “ Defend Public Health ,” a fiscally-sponsored volunteer network of public health researchers, healthcare workers, advocates and allies fighting to protect public health from the Trump administration’s attacks on proven, s...

This week, we dive into an unexpected topic — the rather bizarre Bluesky account run by Altmetric . Altmetric has made some changes lately, including podcasts, so-called sentiment analysis, and Bluesky itself. And their LinkedIn account is much more sober than Bluesky. But as you experience the Bluesky account, you get a feeling that something is definitely not quite right. What is going on here?...

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on drug discovery. He’s been writing a renowned science blog called “ In the Pipeline ” since 2002. Lowe tackles a mix of scientific updates, political perspectives, and critiques of scientific publishing, all in an extremely down-to-earth and readable manner. He’s also the author of a 2016 book, The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Mileston...