The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

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...

Today, we’re talking with Roger McNamee, an entrepreneur, author, musician, and investor with a legacy in Silicon Valley that stretches from his days heading the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund through the social media era and now into the crypto and AI era. In 2019, McNamee published a book — Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — where he outlined how his high hopes for his pr...

Today, we’re talking with Jeremy Berg, a former editor of Science, former President of ASBMB, and former Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the NIH. Earlier this year, Berg grew alarmed at the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the NIH, and began a correspondence with him after his confirmation. For a time, he documented this via his Bluesky accoun...

Today, we’re talking with Nick Evans, who was in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and who recently moved to the Department of Political Science, a move he explains in the interview. Joy met Nick at this year’s Peer Review Congress in Chicago, where he talked about his research around preprints an...

Today, we’re talking with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of the book The AI Con, which came out earlier this year.  Emily is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in th...

Today, we’re talking with Mike Olson, Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Mike published two guest posts on “The Scholarly Kitchen” earlier this year which caught our eye. The first was in March, where he wrote about library catalogs as colonization systems with the power to make naming decisions appear neutral and inev...

Today, we’re joined by Seth Leopold, an orthopaedic surgeon and Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, also known as CORR, a top journal in orthopaedic surgery.  Seth and Kent got to know one another through some projects and mutual concerns about scientific publishing, and this year they published a piece with another editor in marine science outlining their concerns about...

Acetamiophen is one of the most studied analgesics in the world, and was the centerpiece of a famous product recall when a murderer laced capsules with potassium cyanide. The company swept the shelves in the name of public safety, and restocked them only after establishing new tamper-proof packaging. Today, Big Tech is releasing products that are leading to clear consumer harms, yet remain idolize...

This week, in a special Friday episode, we are pleased to bring you an interview with Christine Laine, the Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Internal Medicine, which is published by the American College of Physicians (ACP). The Annals and the ACP have been at the center of a couple of controversies stirred up by the MAHA crowd. You’ll hear how word reached the Annals team that RFK, Jr., wanted a paper...

The author of the book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, Anita Chan is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Today, she joins us to discuss the relationships between Big Data, eugenics, Big Tech, techno-fascism, AI in science, and more. It's an enligh...

It's Peer Review Week — but what does that mean anymore? We examine the focus on AI in this year's event, dissect how the definition of "peer review" has shifted from audience-focused selection and refinement to author-focused speed and scale as science has been platformed and adopted a tech-influenced mindset.   Show Notes [Due to a technical problem, this week is audio-only] Peer Review Week: ht...

In this special episode, we speak with two authors of the position paper, "Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia," Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, and discuss how academics and scientists need to probe the claims of so-called AI systems, their compatibility with scientific and academic endeavors, and the personal responsibilities academics, researchers, and teachers ret...

A July 2025 preprint on Preprints.org (MDPI) gets withdrawn, and the caterwauling about censorship begins. This episode helps you get your bearings, we hope. Show Notes The MDPI withdrawal: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202507.2155/v1 The MAHA Substack complaint: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-mdpi-censors-one-of-the  

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is widely reported as a philanthropy. In fact, it is an LLC operated by the holding company the family uses, sells assets off after acquisition, and is platforming biomedical preprints and other scientific information for its own purposes. It has effectively acquired bioRxiv and medRxiv, operating them in a new entity, openRxiv Corp. In this episode, we explore...

In this episode, we dive deeper into the background of Jim O’Neill, the interim acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the heels of the messy firing of the Senate-approved Director (and actual scientist) Susan Monarez. It turns out, the Silicon Valley desire to have science become predictable, end death, and create endless wealth for a few is really driving a lo...

Today, we dive into a few aspects of the imposition of tech thinking into the scientific endeavor, including business models, AI, accidental certifications, and new NIH policies.    Show Notes Jessica Knurick post: https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/trust-the-science-doesnt-mean-what Comet Plus: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-comet-plus "Scholarly Kitchen" guest post by Mike O...

It's our first interview for the podcast, and we landed a great guest! Jason Steinhauer is a “public historian” working at the intersection of history, tech, media and politics. He writes and speaks about how social media, tech, and A.I. are shaping our history, politics, democracy, and future. His 2021 book, “History, Disrupted,” touches on many of the same issues we discuss in our forthcoming bo...