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.

A recent proposal in Nature from Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney, would require publishers to certify as ISO-9001 organizations, with her justifications fitting with our arguments quite well:

Other links for the episode:

This also marks our 32nd episode since launching the “Disrupted Science” podcast in June — a surprising achievement as according to Riverside 44% of podcasts started don’t make it past three episodes, and only 8% make it past 10 episodes.

Maybe we’re just stubborn enough to make this work. We were stubborn enough to write a book, after all.

We’ve had tremendous guests as we’ve gotten underway, and look forward to some of them returning next year in addition to some great new guests already being lined up.

We also have our final “Discoveries of the Week” and some book updates to share.

Thanks for listening, and for all your support.

Happy New Year!

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/