The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

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 scheduled, so the publisher has arranged for books to be available early at these pre-publication signings:

This week, we discuss having a “platform” for the book, recording podcast interviews, drafting potential op-eds, dealing with reviews and early feedback, and some fun experiences we’ve already had.

We also discuss a mental challenge that sneaked up on us — so much time has passed and so much has changed since we put pens down, we have to become comfortable about talking about the book as if it’s a new thing, when for us it’s more than a year or two old.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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

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” per DORA “should” statements, etc., and to no avail because in the end it is a commercial product that influences careers, university rankings, and provides fodder for profit-driven publishers all over the world.

Constraints on publication made it a reliable measure of centrality in a community. Disrupting constraints on publication via cascading portfolios, pop-up journals, special issues, AI slop, and preprints has compromised the JIF. Researchers no longer recognize lists of high impact journals in their fields.

Clarivate has not addressed in their marketing copy how their 2026 product accounts for what is actually happening in scientific publishing today. They highlight “transparency,” “publisher-neutral,” “6th decade of trust,” and “responsible use,” but the reality is that what they are selling includes fake citations, fake papers, real citations to fake papers, real papers citing fake papers, paid-for authorships, author appropriations, journals that have gone hybrid or OA getting rankings boosts because they are easier to be cited, including by AI, etc. 

What’s different today, even moreso than a year ago, is that the tricks and schemes to use scientific papers as currency for various reasons are known, and turbo-charged by AI.

We’ll be talking more about this in the coming months. But we wanted for now to have a frank conversation about the JIF during “announcements week.” It’s our effort to make you a little more aware of what’s going on in the trust marker and metrics space from our point of view.

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

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:

The book is more obviously relevant, but perhaps like other books we’ve heard authors reflecting upon after publication, we didn’t go far or hard enough.

We also include our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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

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:

We’ve covered a few very active topics in a variety of ways:

This all allowed us to keep learning while we put the finishing touches on the book and got closer to publication date.

Our book is coming out, so we’re focusing on everything that goes into that, while leaving coverage of developments to “The Geyser” and writing there. We also have some other projects in the works that are going to require a lot of focus, so we’re using the time saved doing this to focus on those.

So, stay subscribed to the feed, and we’ll show up soon enough with something we hope you’ll find interesting — we’re just not entirely sure what it might be!

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

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 that the DOI is a brand asset being exploited across scientific publishing as a fake certification code. Predatory publishers boast when they get a DOI. Pseudoscience grifters litter their citation lists with DOIs to make it appear as if certifying bodies have signed off on their claims. So, it’s no wonder that usage of DOIs is spiking as MAHA and other fake science grifts accelerate.

This points out a lack of serious governance of certification in general, even accidental certification via technological tools that can be made to look validating and certifying to those outside science.

We start with a side-quest into the papers offered to the Trump Administration by Joe Rogan to get an executive order about psychedelics rolling.

Finally, we have our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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

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 . . . the Colbert Questionert!

Enjoy this lighthearted episode, including three “Discoveries of the Week.” We’ll be back with more interviews and serious topics next week.

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

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 troubled times.

In addition teaching for 18 years at William and Mary and writing books, Bauer is a farmer and a publisher.

We discuss a grab-bag of topics, including:

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week:”

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 social media to AI.

President Trump has been a media manipulator since the beginning:

Which brings us to the new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which is mostly a who’s who of media manipulators masquerading as technologists:

These CEOs have a combined wealth in excess of US$900 billion.

Overall, it looks like a group formed to deliver the Singularity and realize Adam Becker’s worst nightmare — nuclear power, fusion, compute, AI, and techno-authoritarianism.

How are these people being propped up?

We discuss where science fits or doesn’t, and share our zero-gravity “Discoveries of the Week.”

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

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 statement.

In these debates, a poll is taken before the participants speak to gauge audience sentiment at the outset. Then, after the speakers exchange opening statements and responses, the poll is repeated.

Before the start of the debate, 80% of the audience believed AI would be a net benefit to scholarly communications. After a professional and well-natured presentation of facts, 52% of the audience came to believe that AI would not be a net benefit to scholarly communications.

We discuss a variety of great and relevant topics, including use of AI in colleges, the dark downsides, and fears of skill, cognitive, and information degradation, as well as tricks and techniques companies are using to force these on us or convince them of their benign value.

It’s a great conversation.

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

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 general in the scientific and scholarly publishing space.

Started to reputation-wash himself after Microsoft lost its 2001 anti-trust case — with Gates himself testifying in a memorable set of exchanges — the Gates Foundation’s reputation has been eroding for some time. The Epstein Files may be the end of the line for this effort to rehabilitate Gates’ reputation.

As we write in our upcoming book, Gates is not alone in trying to use money to influence priorities in science, medicine, and scientific publishing:

They are all proving problematic.

We discuss Phase 1 of funder involvement, and how this has created a bridge into a more dire potential Phase 2 as MAHA grifters have learned the tricks of sheltering cash and spending on grifter science.

We also share our Discoveries of the Week.

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