Espionage, organized crime, corruption....That's right we're talking about academic publishing. Joy Moore and Kent Anderson, two long time insiders in the world of scholarly publishing, join the show to talk about their new book 'How the Internet Disrupted Science'.

They discuss what forces led to a flipping of incentives and a flood of money into the world of publishing science and how this has corrupted the industry. We also discuss the determent this has on society through grifting, misinformation, fraud, theft and more.

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www.disruptedscience.com

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What is up Brad fans?

How you doing?

How are you living?

In this episode we are talking about academic publishing, a topic I bet you thought you wouldn't like, but you will.

For those that don't know, academic publishing is the publication of scientific works.

So these papers which describe scientists findings, their methods, they're submitted to a journal and reviewed by anonymous experts in the same discipline.

If the work is poor, it's rejected, if not, it's accepted and then published in an academic journal.

Easy, right?

Well that's how it was supposed to work.

My guests today both worked in this publishing industry in various capacities and have now co authored a book titled how the Internet Disrupted Science.

Joy has been described as a key player in the discovery and adoption of technology into the workflow to produce, disseminate and monetize scholarly and medical products.

Kent Anderson too has worked in the scholarly publishing industry for over 30 years.

He has held several prominent positions as director of journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics and publishing Director at the New England Medical Journal of Medicine, just to name a few.

He also founded the Webby nominated blog Scholarly Kitchen and runs the current paid E newsletter the Geyser.

And the book lays out in their view the harms caused to academic publishing because of the Internet.

They also take aim at Silicon Valley, the business practices and the ideology and make a case that all of these have been a detriment to publishing and society.

Our conversation focused a lot on the consequences, such as the proliferation of misinformation and the corrupting influence of money and big tech.

But this story reads at times like a true crime novel involving organized crime, espionage and even Jeffrey Epstein makes an appearance.

For those juicy details, you'll need to read the book and I would recommend it.

I enjoyed it.

It really got me thinking about why something like academic publishing really matters.

Why the scientific body of work needs to be protected as best we can from corrupting influence.

It's our record of experiment and knowledge and we use it to save lives, build things and understand our reality.

If we, if it gets corrupted, deluded or discredited, I think then we have a problem.

And throughout the book the authors use quotes from fictional and real characters at the beginning of each chapter to really hammer this home.

Like this one from the fictional Mon Mothma from the series andor I believe we are in crisis.

The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.

Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.

The death of truth is the ultimate victory.

Evil.

When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

Feels rather prescient, no?

And I think this story of academic publishing and the corrupting influence of technology.

And the Internet is like so many.

Stories that we now know all too well, which together make up one of these stories of our time.

In my opinion, a reckoning we're having with the Internet as a disruptive technology, but also with the philosophies and beliefs of Silicon Valley and some of its more rich members.

Their power, wealth and influence are undeniable.

Their technology is powerful.

And like all products of scientific achievement, its use is inevitably shaped by the people who make it and who wield it.

Thankfully, Joy and Kent do have some solutions as how the academic publishing industry could push back, and we discussed those too.

One of which is moving away from open access, which I must admit, I still struggle with, or at least I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge and scientific literature should be available to anyone who wants it.

But as you'll hear in the conversation, I do see the other view where this information is not useful or helpful, even unless you're working in the field.

And you know what it means.

It's almost as if maybe, just maybe, something like a thoroughly vetted, globally collaborative collection of all human scientific knowledge and data should be kept just a little precious.

As always, thank you so much for listening.

Please give us a review a like a comment wherever you're getting this video.

If you want to send a couple bucks, check the show notes for links to the website and how to donate.

And if you want to send the show a message to brad4umail.com and now my conversation with Joy Moore and Kent Anderson.

Hello Joy.

Kent, thank you so much for being here and congratulations on the book.

Very happy to to spe about this.

This book, how the Internet disrupted science and academic publishing, because I think it's a topic that if you're outside of the academic world, you may have heard of it, but we don't really realize how important it actually is to the scientific endeavor, let's say.

And some critical changes that have happened along the way probably in the last, what, 15, 20 years, really with the Internet.

Right.

Has disrupted a lot of things.

So thank you so much for taking the time.

I wanted to say.

Yeah, no problem.

I wanted to say right off the bat.

I really liked the way the book used quotes to open sections of the book and the chapters and stuff, really pertinent quotes.

So I wanted to get a quick thought on that because one of the quotes that stood out, part one, it's a fictional character, fictional quote, but it's so prescient for our time.

The quote by Mon Mothma from the Andor series, which I really loved, about.

The death of truth.

Yeah.

And I just think that that really sort of sets the stakes for us in this conversation because it's something that everybody is worried about.

Everyone keeps talking about the death of truth, science, backlash against science.

And so I'll start.

Maybe Joy with.

You can kind of introduce yourself to the audience why you were motivated to write this book.

And maybe just a note on the stakes.

We'll go to Kent after that, and then we can dig into.

We'll jump back to what is publishing, how does it work, and then how it maybe went off the rails, in your opinion.

Okay, great.

So I was motivated to write this book with Kent because I took a couple years off from being in the industry to do family things, like many people of our age do.

And when I wanted to come figure out, like, okay, now I need to get a job again, there, like, I was unemployable because I did not believe or agree with a lot of the things that the publishers were doing.

And so I reached out to my friend Kentucky, and he was like, yeah, you're right.

And so we put our heads together and decided to work on telling the story of what we together and separately laid down the tracks for how the Internet disrupted scientific publishing and who was involved and where it came from and where it has gotten us to today.

Great.

And then.

Yeah, same.

Same question to you, Kent.

Obviously, it sounds like Joy reached out to you to write this book, but what were you feeling and thinking about the need for a book like this at this moment?

Yeah.

And like, the quote from Andor, you.

Know, when you start to lose connection with reality, you open the door to.

Fascists and to grifters and to liars.

And to cheats who can mislead people.

And there's a lot more at stake,.

You know, for demagogues and things like that.

There's a lot more at stake than just whether you can believe the vitamin you're taking is good, but whether the culture you live in is harmonious with reality or going sideways.

And so when Joy reached out, I realized that I had the perfect co.

Author to do this kind of thing.

And we knew that we needed to at that point I and had gotten exhausted trying to work inside the house.

So we decided, okay, it's time to go get the clangers and the cowbells and run out into the street and raise a ruckus to the society at wide to say, you know, this house is on fire and this is a real problem for everybody.

Because it's a, like you said, it's a, it's kind of the cornerstone of a lot of, of things that society needs to have functioning well.

Yeah.

And so, so I think we should take a moment just to sort of unpack what academic publishing is because I know that people, especially now I would, I would gather that you know, probably five years ago, obviously post pandemic.

Pandemic looms large in all of these things.

Covid A lot of people probably wouldn't know what a peer reviewed or like a, like a, an academic journal article.

Never heard of that term.

And now people hear of it, they know of it, they see the abstracts clipped in their social media posts.

Right.

And everything like this.

So let's unpack exactly what this publishing process is.

Let's say I have my experience with it, having gone through a PhD, but this is in a nutshell how scientists publish their literature for other scientists and now I guess for the public, you know, and then we can get into the open access arguments and things like that.

But why don't.

I'll leave it.

Who wants to take the sort of the, the Cliff Notes, the Coles Notes on, on academic publishing, how it, how it started and then we can.

The changes that you're talking about in.

The book, the disruption.

All right, I'll take the, the background and then Kent can augment it.

So scientific papers are, you know, a researcher does an experiment.

There's a formula to how they write up their notes and they publish it in a journal for other people who are interested in what they are doing to refer to, that's like the most basic thing, super community focus, very specific to different disciplines.

They have different ways of using language and, and what they are, you know, trying to achieve.

And that's the basis of scientific publishing and journals.

And there's a long history of, you know, how the journal industry came to be a global industry and how it intersects with academics and academic capitalism and how people who are doing basic research all the way through to, you know, practitioners are, are paid and for publishing and, and the publishing is part of the.

The job.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So reward system sprung up around research publication, but in most fields, the researchers are outnumbered by practitioners in a field by anywhere from 90 to 1.

You know, in some fields, it's almost unitary, you know, like physics, some of the physics fields and some of the math fields.

There aren't too many people, you know, running around your town practicing math, but they're, they're in act, you know, in academic centers doing, you know, pulling apart things with math.

But there are a lot of physicians and a lot of engineers and a lot of chemists and people like that working in your town who don't actually publish papers.

And so the focus has always, traditionally, has traditionally been on the consumers or the practitioners in the field, with the researchers kind of sharing their notes among themselves, but with a real focus on how can this improve the practice in this field, right?

Or how does this matter to us doing chemistry better or doing medicine better, doing mechanical engineering better or doing surgery better.

And I think that one of the, the changes was when that very specific and, and relatively calm market met the attention economy of the Internet.

And all of a sudden what had been sort of, you know, posturing by some researchers for citations and for recognition and for prestige, all of a sudden they could add attention to that.

And then people who simply wanted to get attention could pile into the scientific literature.

And that's why you see things like abstracts on social media now, because they aren't sharing it with other scientists.

They're sharing it because they get secondary or tertiary rewards from the attention that that generates.

And the other thing that the attention economy fusing with it led to was this idea that a scientific paper says something that can change your life, and that is never true.

A real scientific paper tells other scientists, hey, this is interesting.

You might want to check it out.

But that's pretty much all it says.

And so I think that's, you know, because when I look at it as having practiced science, you know, in the basic research sense you look at academic publishing is like, we have to put our results out there so other people can scrutinize.

So other people, other scientists, right, can scrutinize so that you can replicate.

And, you know, people have probably heard about the replication crisis and all this stuff, but it was a way of, you know, the way I always viewed is this is how we put the body of work that research in a field is doing.

And it's a cumulative thing.

You know, like people disagree and one paper might disagree with another one.

Right.

And science is a.

Is a walking education crisis.

Yeah, that's what science is.

And, but, but we needed a way to.

Yeah, to cement.

Cement is probably too strong of a word, but, you know, to put these findings out here so that we could have a discussion, so that we could say, well, this, there's a strong track record for this phenomenon or for this medicine or for this whatever.

Right.

You need that expertise.

You need that sort of.

And for other scientists to discover who.

Else in their fields doing things that.

They might want to.

Exactly.

On.

Right.

So it also helps people realize who's doing.

Interesting.

Exactly.

And so I think that there's.

I mean, we're maybe jumping ahead, but talking about how it's getting misused and misabused.

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of, like you said, what is in a scientific paper, Is it going to like, will this one paper change your life?

No, it will not.

You know, so we have the incentive then for scientists to publish in these, in these journals.

And then leaving the attention economy out of it for a moment, the publisher incentive.

Where does that come from?

Let's talk about the model before open access and the model before the Internet, how the publishers sort of made money on this.

And like you said, it was a calm market.

And then maybe.

I think the open access shift is something Kent, I believe you have opinions on.

And we could, I think, maybe start there as moving into the discussion of the disruption.

But publisher incentive, they get paid by the author to publish in there.

Well, so, yeah, if you don't mind,.

Joy, I'll jump in on this one.

Is that okay?

Yeah.

So traditionally, publishers made money through subscriptions.

Right.

So they would.

And that made it so that the editors were pretty much immune from considerations about how many articles they accepted.

In fact, there were usually limits on how many they could accept for budgetary reasons.

And it also made it so that they were accountable to the.

The base of the journal for finding.

Relevant, high quality, interesting things.

Right.

When the open access.

And that was.

So that's consumer pays.

Open access turned flips that around to a very Internet advertising model, producer pays.

So now you have people who are producing content paying to place it in journals.

And that leads to a couple of things.

One is you only make money.

You make more money the more you publish.

Right.

Because every article is worth a certain amount of money.

Right.

So the publisher, the journal makes more money if it accepts more articles?

Yeah, if it accepts more articles.

And the other is it puts a price on a rejection for an editor.

So an editor knows and editors for the first time with Open Access, I saw an editor actually presented with, here's your revenue budget.

You have to generate this much revenue through your editorial processes because of the open access model.

And that was very insidious.

And so I was asked by one of the editors, how do I do this?

And I said, well, a, you can't raise the price because everybody's fussing about the price tag.

So you just have to lower your standards.

And she was a little bit aghast.

But that's what happens with this model.

So it becomes very volume oriented and it means they're not accountable to anybody in a sense, because once an article is published, there's no way for a consumer to say, I'm canceling this title because the consumer doesn't matter anymore.

They're not paying for anything.

Right.

So, yeah, and I know, I think we should just give a note too on what some of those fees could be, because I don't recall exactly.

You know, that was something that my lab, my PhD supervisor took care of when we were publishing a paper.

And I never published in anything, you know, like the big ones like Nature or Science or something.

I think PNAS was the highest I ever got.

But it's like thousands, thousands to publish your article in these journals.

You could publish for little dollars all the way up to, you know, many thousands of dollars depending on where you want to publish.

And I think that's what this whole change to producer pays has introduced.

Lots of different publishers, lots of different publishing opportunities globally where you could probably publish a paper, you know, in the next 15 minutes.

We could do it online and create a, you know, LLM generated thing and give somebody, you know, 50 bucks somewhere in the world.

And it will be published, right?

Yeah.

And I know that that's again, and we'll get to that, the paper mills and all these predatory journals and all that stuff.

But I want to just sit on the open access thing because again, I think it's important and I've now seen it sort of from both sides a little bit in my journalistic work.

I'm often looking for papers, trying to find papers, and I either run it, so I get open access is great for me because I can, I get, you know, I now have access to some of these things.

There's still paywalls and stuff like that.

And I see the incentives that you're talking about.

In terms of like, it flips the incentives and there's an insidious nature now to it in terms of, you know, volume.

We're going to make our money on volume, not necessarily quality.

So I think we could take a minute to talk about the peer review, how the quality is supposed to be enforced.

And I wonder if you just have thoughts or, you know, opinions on, you know, the spirit of open access.

Because again, as a science communicator, as someone that works on this side of it now that's kind.

The idea that anybody could pick up that like it's publicly funded research is often the argument, you know, this is, it's for the good of society, all this stuff.

We should want people to have access to the knowledge that their governments, their institutions are producing.

And I know that there's a lot, we're seeing some of the problems with that.

But what is your thought?

Maybe Joy, you could give your opinion on just that, the spirit of open access.

And maybe was it flawed from the beginning or did it have a, was there a nice idea there that maybe.

Just didn't work out?

There was definitely a nice idea there that didn't work out.

And you put it perfectly the idea of, you know, we can put things online, we can make it available to people around the globe, we could make it cheaper or faster or smoother for other interested, you know, brains to get on ideas.

It was such a wonderful intention.

But we have found that the wonderful intention has, has spawned a lot of misintentions and misinformation and an abuse of the literature.

And there are other ways to make that information available to people who need it.

That's been like, put by the wayside in pursuits of platforming, scaling, monetization, advertising base models.

And so the initial idea of making more biomedical information free to people who need it, it's a great idea.

It's been used and abused and monetized in, in ways that we never intended when we set up the infrastructure to make it happen.

Yeah, and I think one of the things we explore in the book is how Silicon Valley politics, especially cyber libertarianism, has worked to make it so.

They really helped drive this in a.

Way that a lot of people don't appreciate.

By injecting money into it, by paying.

For Creative Commons to help leech away copyright and intellectual property rights that, that,.

You know, now people are realizing they never should have given those up because a reuse of scientific literature has non legal barriers to it.

Like you're not supposed to plagiarize, you're not supposed to double publish.

So why do you need to have.

Reuse rights for that?

Because nobody's allowed to reuse it and things like that.

But they, Silicon Valley's model is about scale and about platforming as much information as possible.

So they've been funding a lot of things to make sure that as much information is published as possible and that the attention economy continues to thrive by always having something new to chew on, something new to make you click.

And a lot of this has fed into it.

And then also, you know, like Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates foundation and others have put.

And the more, you know, more foundation, which, you know, comes from intel.

They, they want to make sure that they have things for their LLMs.

They want to make sure that they have things, just information for all the platforms and systems they can imagine and they don't care about anything else.

And there's been a.

It's kind of an insidious politics because it's full of all sorts of other things that we unpack in the book like eugenics and transhumanism and effective altruism and all of these other kind of terrible ideas when you look them straight in the eye.

Yeah, the Silicon Valley, that's something that I didn't really realize was as pernicious, I guess, in the science.

Because when we talk about the attention economy, as someone that reads a lot of academic papers, they are, I don't know how it's keeping anybody's attention.

Like these things are not written, you know, they're very boring.

Well, they shouldn't be.

Right, Exactly.

That I was going to ask you, like, as a person who writes and reads these papers, they are boring and on purpose.

Right.

Because they're written Exactly.

For the people who care about them, which is probably one to five other individuals on the planet.

Yeah.

But now they have been turned into press releases, media fodder, things that are pushing legislation and changing minds.

And so that's one of the things that Kent and I were like, what this, these papers are being used, abused, manipulated, manufactured, and they're now part of the ecosystem that is changing minds and policies for people everywhere.

Well, and Brad, like you mentioned, you're seeing these papers around and it'll be like an abstract screenshot.

Right.

Or image.

And what has happened is the form factor has been taken and misused and misapplied.

So it looks like a scientific.

If you just put it in that format.

And there are a couple of.

Yeah, it just, you know, so it.

And we call these gaslight journals and or gaslight preprints too because there's also the cyber libertarian politics brought to life.

Something called pre printing at scale on platforms which are unreviewed papers.

And I think, you know, we talk.

About scale and we talk about, you.

Know, the attention economy and all of that.

The truth of the matter is a lot of it's a lot of the stuff that's being churned out by LLMs.

And by you know, people just seeking to, you know, solidify, keep their by.

Careerist scientists and others is vanilla.

It's boring, it's dumb, it's not going.

To make a difference.

You know, you don't need to really care about it.

Nobody cares about it.

The problem is it takes maybe 10 to 12 papers to totally make everything go crazy.

Because what happens then like you were talking about, you know, these papers get weaponized.

They get, you know, turned into, into alternative media channels like substacks and youtubes and Twitter and all of these things with all these wild claims or that if there's an error that gets picked up on by an opportunist who makes hay with that error for years.

Still living with it.

Not because it.

There's nothing unprecedented.

There's really nothing unprecedented about that paper.

There have been bad papers in the literature before.

What's unprecedented is we have a platform and attention economy that makes money by perpetuating it.

Yeah, and that's the big difference.

So any one of these errors now has much more significance and becomes much more long lasting than it ever was before.

And I think what Kent just said is really key.

And maybe we could talk about this a little bit more.

Is the making money part.

There was never a lot of money to be made in publishing scientific papers until the Internet came along.

And now there's a lot of money being to be made there and not in ways that you would have normally thought.

Right.

Not as an academic, but there's advertising, there's platforming and there's a lot more at hand.

Yeah, well, and I even think of, you know, like what I do, right, Science journalism, like there's now an audience for this or science communication.

Right, there's an audience for this.

And I feel like there's always.

And we're kind of, I'm feeling it a bit here too.

This.

I've had many discussions with science communicators and about you know, sort of just even the nate like why do we do this?

Why, why should people care?

Why do we think People should care.

And often I think there's not a lot of thought that goes into that.

You know, a lot of science communicator, journalist people did science and are just very enthusiastic about it.

You know, we're those ones that like think it's super neat and it's really great.

So we're saying that there's this body of literature that we need to produce for other scientists, but we don't want to take it.

We don't, we don't want to like make it too important in a way.

You know, like where it's, it's, it's the be all, end all kind of thing, the way it's portrayed.

But then on the other side I'm like, well, you need the research in.

Order to make informed decisions about health.

Care policy and all this stuff, so there's an important place for it.

But maybe it's, it's, it's not as important as it's portrayed or as it's, as it's being, as it's being thrown out onto the Internet.

And again, for the people that are doing that are not doing it because they think the body of work is important, they're doing it to make money.

Right.

So it's, so where do these tension, you know, how do we deal with these, these, some of these tensions, right?

Because it's, we want it, we want it to be available to who it needs to be available to.

I, I do.

I still buy the argument that like, you know, making it like if a student wants to go to the library and access journals, you know, they should be able to do that or just even like, you know, a concerned person.

Like I feel like there's a right people have to information.

But so is it, is it how we discuss then like if someone like me a science, how I discuss the scientific literature, how it gets portrayed in media.

I think that's also a problem when the headlines that get ripped in that the health space I think is the worst for this where.

And you.

I'm sure you've heard this example coffee one, one year is, is the best thing and then the next year it's gonna kill you.

And then the next year it's, you know, so the way that science is discussed, popularized in media, all of this stuff, this is all issues that I don't have answers to.

Yeah.

I mean one of the things we.

Try to tell people is if somebody's aiming a scientific claim at you have your guard up.

You have to really wonder why.

Because scientific claim space is for other Scientists to adjudicate.

And the other thing we really kind of harp on is, you know, there's a big under.

There's been a lot of work to.

Undermine institutions in the United States especially, but also a little bit in Canada and elsewhere.

And that work is being done by people who don't want to share power, who want more power for themselves, and they don't like it dispersed into accountable organizations that the public actually owns and funds.

And so we always, I always, in my mind, I'm always like, you know, if, if meta or Alphabet or someone that one of those companies does something,.

Changes something or introduces something, I don't.

Know who did it.

I have no names associated with it.

I don't know who was on the board and voted for it.

I don't know any of that.

But if the CDC comes out with a recommendation about vaccines, at least before the current administration, you knew who was on acip, on the ACIP panel, you knew what their qualifications were.

You knew there were minutes that were publicly available, all of this stuff.

And so I think if we want the kind of accountability that we as citizens should have of our scientific enterprise, we need to put trust back into some of those institutions and let the scientists who are sincerely, in almost every case, trying to serve the public, they're there sacrificing lucrative corporate jobs in a lot of cases in order to do that.

So I think we kind of need.

To get back to some respect for our institutions.

Even if they need to be reformed,.

It's important that they're there.

There was an interesting article in Nature a couple days ago, Nature News, that came out about a big study about trust in science.

And it actually showed that, like, a lot of people still trust scientists and, and these sorts of figures in, in, in, in public life.

So we always talk about this lack of trust in science and stuff, but I think that, yeah, maybe it's, it's, it's misplaced.

And so then it.

Again, it's, it's not that there's a lack of trust in science.

It's maybe that there's an information overload too.

I think that that's, that that could be it as well.

Right.

I think you're right on both of those points.

There's definitely an information overload that has emerged in the last, you know, five, 10 years.

Especially one of the wonderful things that we talk to a lot of people who work in public health and they say, like, public health works when you don't know it's happening.

Like you don't know how many?

Absolutely.

How many outbreaks and disasters and, you know, explosive diarrhea from lettuce thing that they have prevented?

They do that when you eat a.

Salad and don't have explosive diarrhea.

Thank you.

Science.

Yeah, they do that under the radar.

And, and that, and that applies across science, especially science that turns into things that help, you know, cure diseases or prevent diseases or turn into products and things like that.

So a lot of.

So to your point about journalism, it's hard to find.

Like, it's, it's like the boring stuff happens under the radar.

The interesting stuff are these, like, little headlines that are like, you know, there's something, you know, everyone should be alarmed about and that's what gets a lot of attention and things like that.

So I'm going to turn that question back to you.

Like, how do you write about the boring stuff that didn't happen?

Yeah, I mean, it's a tough one.

And I think it's, you know, this, this how the Internet disrupted, you know, it, it disrupted news media as well.

Right.

Like, it's, I feel like it's all, we're all kind of dealing with the, the unintended or unforeseen or we just didn't think about it.

Consequences of the attention economy.

Right.

Like when, when that is the model.

And it sounded great in theory.

You know, everything's free on the Internet.

Like, you can get like all my journalism now.

You know, I can go any newspaper or whatever.

Right.

But then that, yeah, that drives a certain thing.

And I mean, I, I talk about this with science communication people and students that I teach science communication and science journalism stuff too, is, you know, the, the, the range of human emotion that's available to tell your story, to tell your science story is, is wide and varied and you should use all of it.

And I feel like the people that are gaming the attention economy, they've figured out the, the number one, you're the top two emotions that work, which is anger and fear.

And they're using that.

Right.

Like, and that's, I think, a source of the problem.

And so then if the rest of journalism is just trying to catch up to that while still maintaining values of ethics and truth and stuff, like you're fighting a.

Losing, a losing battle.

So I look at it as a scientist, well, how do we tell better stories about the people that do science and about the motivations?

Because there's so many wonderful emotions that are in there.

Curiosity, failure, success, challenges.

You know, there's wonderful stories.

And I feel like our science media is stuck on these.

You know, coffee's going to do this or, you know, the next this or.

Well, there's something to, you know, inside of what you're saying which is there's people are looking for something definite, you know, coffee will do this, coffee won't do that.

Right.

And there, there's.

And so the worried well are a.

Big market for all of these snake oil salesmen.

And there's also has emerged kind of.

A spa style lifestyle brand thing around all of this stuff too.

I was watching Jimmy Kimmel, they had a $12 water that's being sold by some fancy pants spa store or something like that.

I forget what it was, but it's a cup of water and it has a little, you know, hieroglyphic kind of font on it.

And you get a cup and it's $12.

And so they went to the hose behind their studio and filled up cups and made mock them up with the water thing on it and had people taste it and they're like, oh yes, it has a nutty quality.

I can feel it.

It's more.

Mouth feels better and I can feel it all the way through my body.

It's going to make me.

The hydration is just so superior with this.

And they told them it was hose water and they're like great.

Really?

Yeah.

Because there's a salesmanship to that.

The interface of science and medicine and society that isn't possible with any other type of science.

Right.

There's a hustle that you can bring to it and you can get things done.

And that's why that area is so, so fraught and, and so abused.

And then you have people who have risen on that kind of abuse of it.

And then like you were saying, there's kind of the flooding, the zone aspect.

Right.

You get people so discombobulated that they don't know who to trust.

Yeah, yeah.

It's.

The health space is obviously the biggest one, but it, you know, it intersects with some of the other one because then you see the things like oh, this.

I saw one.

There's like a rod that you're supposed to stir your water with to chemically activate your water.

Like what does that even mean?

There's a lot of crossover.

Right.

And one of the things that.

And it's.

We talk about it in the book is that the, the open access and free sharing of information came from physics, especially high energy particle physics, because these folks had very dense information that they needed to share with each other.

And at the early days before the public Internet came.

They figured out a way to share files between each other to get feedback and figure out where to publish.

And so that is kind of like the root of all of the open access ideology that biomedical folks said, well, the physics people are doing that, so we should do it too.

And the chemistry people did it, and some of the engineering, but not so many.

But it has morphed from a, an idea to solve a practical problem to.

Into something that is another thing altogether where we're sharing information that is not really ready for prime time.

And now it takes on a special sense of being inside information or, you know.

Yeah, and there, yeah, there's a, there's one of the things about the technologists, and there are a few anecdotes around this in the book, is they become very happy when they can execute a scale function with their technology that makes whatever they're promoting really prominent.

Even if it's bad science, even if it's unreviewed science.

They are so happy when all of a sudden they can just show that they got all this attention or that.

They generated all these metrics or they.

Made it so that they could make all this money through clicks.

And so their, their incentives are not in line with science's incentives, which are about discovery and small markets, you know, small groups of people trying to solve very specific problems.

And so that orthogonal relationship is kind of at the base of a lot of the kinds of things we're talking about where, you know, technology wants to make everything scale.

And science is like, no, it doesn't need to scale.

We just need to figure out how to make this carbon fiber more efficiently and, you know, get.

And reduce pollutants by 10%.

Yeah, exactly.

Which then cumulatively, over time improves our, you know, solves the big challenges that we, that we are aiming to solve.

But so that's, it's, again, it's a weird kind of tension that I feel because it's like, you know, we're saying this is, again, this is important.

And like, to the public health example that you made, Joy, it's like, it's important.

You need to trust us, but you also don't need to know what we're doing, which feels weird, right?

And I feel like that's something else that grifters can sort of, you know, that's one of the angles.

We can sell you.

The thing I was just, just this morning, there was another about the explosive diarrhea outbreak Peter McCullough and his wellness company already have in their, in their kit, their emergency kit.

They already have something to treat you for that.

There's always somebody who's going to have something to sell you on the back of a scare that you can get faster than going to your doctor and asking them, you know, what should I do?

But I think the opacity that you're talking about isn't in the scientific literature, really.

It isn't in the scientific institutions as they have been before this current administration and current time period.

They were actually very accountable.

You knew who was there.

They documented their meetings, they presented them.

You know, you could inquire.

They were open to journalists, they were talking.

And now you have.

You look at all those people who have been shunted aside, all those committees that have been shut down, all the people who have been told to toe the line or, you know, or take a hike.

And so the opacity of the grifters is actually very.

Yeah, it's much higher and it's very telling because they are.

They are running a marketing operation and they are running science.

And science.

Science has a natural availability.

I mean, people complain that this article is so expensive or whatever, but if it's a.

If it's not.

If it's not part of you doing your job.

Yeah, it's going to be expensive because, well, you're just a tourist.

You know, it's like.

And, you know, if it's not part of your professional life, why do you care?

You know, because you're.

If you want to get a job in science, go get all trained up and, you know, find a job.

Exactly.

When I think that's maybe that's what it.

You know, I was thinking about that, and then the way that, what you just said, it kind of really clarified it.

It's like, I think part of the problem is that, like, we.

Everything worked and it.

And like, as you said, it was very transparent if you wanted to go look at it.

But it's like, now people want to go look at it, Right.

Whereas before, it's like nobody cared.

And it was actually kind of good, you know, because it's like, and it's.

So funny you mentioned the library.

It's like, if you want to.

If you want to get good information, just go to a library or log into your library.

But anything that is pushed in your face on social media specifically is probably not what you think it is, you.

Know, and that's tough for.

Yeah, it's another incentive.

Right, exactly.

And it's tough for even me, like, doing, doing something like this, this conversation.

You know, I'm going to Put it online.

And I'm going to.

And I'm going to some level.

You know, I don't.

I feel like I don't sensationalize.

I'm sure we all do in some way.

Right.

You know, it's part of the business, I guess, but it's like, I want to.

I feel like it's relevant information.

People should.

Well, communication you want.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's.

That's, that's, that's kind of the traditional.

I mean, I mean, I went to go see the Odyssey.

It's like, that's a really good story because it keeps your attention what's going to happen with him.

So, you know, I think we've covered this, the grifting space a lot.

Right.

And I feel like people inherently sort of understand that, you know, there's a lot of this going on.

We kind of.

We're.

I feel like we're coming around to that.

That kind of thing.

And we're seeing that that side of the misuse of scientific literature is well, more well known than, say, some of the others.

So I just wanted to touch on a couple things and then leave some time to actually talk about solutions.

Because you have some ideas about solutions.

So it's not one of those doom and gloom conversations.

Right.

But the sort of, again, the big tech influence and, you know, there's examples where it's the example of like the cigarette companies using the scientific literature to put their own spin information out there.

So with this new model with the Internet, the open access, the attention economy, how are companies now more able to sort of maybe do that or sort of fuzz the literature or fund the literature in a way that fits their goals, this kind of thing.

I know oil companies get that a lot, but I think there's probably other examples that people wouldn't think of that are going on.

Yeah.

So one of them is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

So they fund two biomedical preprint servers, Bio Archive and medRxiv.

And people believe Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, is a philanthropy, but it's not.

It's an LLC owned by the Zuckerbergs.

And they, they can buy things with that.

They can sell things from there.

I think they bought it or 14 and.

And they were Canadian.

You're welcome.

They were Canadian, yeah.

Sam and Amy Molineau from Toronto and.

They bought this company up and then they tried to roll it out and there was this whole crazy thing where they rolled out something from it and it lasted on the Internet for three days before it got laughed off because.

It was so racist and misogynistic.

But in any event they decided to shutter it.

But they kept the brand.

And the Meta brand actually comes from this acquisition that Czi made and they transferred it to the overall company.

But they fund these preprint servers and then they use.

Which makes unreviewed papers, puts them online on a platform for free.

And then they have agreements where with the authors where anybody posting there their content immediately is available for Meta's LLMs.

And so it's basically their way of getting gas right for their LLMs.

And this is one of the ways they do it.

There, there was the Chinese company Huawei was caught with, you know, judging, doing business with the Optical Society of America in a way that they shouldn't have so they could have access to research.

There's a real blind spot I think among the scientific societies about technology being like a cigarette company being.

And I think it's, I think it's changing.

But also the adoption of LLMs has been shocking how naive they are about adopting those.

And Joy has, Joy has seen that firsthand.

Well, maybe you can unpack that Joy, because I think that's something that.

Yeah, people are more and more.

The AI thing is getting pushed on everybody so much and maybe we don't really consider that.

Yeah, you need as you said, the cheap gas or the information to, to, to populate these models.

And if.

And it.

And it's a garbage in, garbage out problem, I'm sure there's lots of problems go.

So please.

Perfect setup.

Yeah, the garbage in, garbage out idea is nonsense when it comes to LLMs because there's a huge, I call it FOMO fear of missing out with a lot of publishers where they're thinking if we, if we give our, our high quality information to these platforms and to these, you know, systems, then the information that's coming out will be better.

And that's not how LLMs work.

That's not how AI works.

You can't get better information from what Emily Bender, if you haven't read her work or followed her, you should.

She calls it's paper mache.

Like you put things, you put papers into a soup and then they churn it out and make it into something else.

You can't put better papers in to make better paper mache.

And a lot of the Publishers have tried to get on the side of good by putting their good information into these systems, but they're being used and abused.

And in my opinion, because the business models for these companies have nothing to do with giving you the right information on the outside.

It's all about getting your input and getting your information to sell you something or to monetize you as the user.

So it's the same thing as social media.

It's no different if you're not paying for it, you are the product and the products that are going into these systems, just like with music, just like with news, content, other things, that's the bait to get you as the user into this ecosystem.

And it's, it's really sad that it's happening so explicitly with science.

Yeah, I mean, these systems will never say, I don't know.

And I think, you know, we talk about the attention economy, there's also the extraction economy economy, where all of these platforms are trying to extract everything they can out of the creatives, from journalists to musicians to scientists, making reports and, and create some sort of unitary singularity that's going to do some crazy stuff, but.

Or they believe in their fantasy land,.

But at the same time, they're making a lot of money doing that.

I mean, you know, Spotify is one.

Of my favorites for how they have.

Found a way to, you know, make money by peddling an AI slop, you know, but the same thing is happening in the scientific literature.

And, you know, there's, there's a whole.

Bunch we talk a lot about too.

But because the Internet's an inherently insecure medium about how libraries have been hacked and shut down, how, you know, the, there are nation states battling over this, the security holes are everywhere.

And, you know, so there's a lot of.

It's a, it's kind of the.

It's a chaotic environment that the Internet has created, and there are incentives to keep it that way or make it even more purposefully extractive.

And this is, this is the part of the conversation where it starts to feel overwhelming.

Right?

And it's like it's everything because we haven't even really touched on, you know, paper mills and predatory journals and these kind of things.

So it feels like there's all these incentives lined up against what this body of work was meant to be, which was a depository of expert information for experts to scrutinize and learn and improve this.

You know, so I think that there's definitely things to be done in terms of how we talk about science and like the definitive nature of it and how it's.

It's not really that definitive.

It does change over time and.

But I feel like every time you bring up one of these things, you can see how that phrase then gets weaponized.

Right.

Like, it's, it's just so.

It feels very overwhelming and we see now.

And that's what I thought the book was really fascinating because it's.

Yeah, there's big forces at play here.

You know, there's the national security angle, but it's just, it just, it kind of filters all through society.

And the.

Again, the Mon Mothma quote kind of sums up a lot of what we're dealing with.

So it feels like there's nothing, There's a lot, not a lot we can do because we, everywhere we turn, like you said, music, art, journalism, everything, everything is falling this way.

So you want to say, well, we need, we need big moves at the top to regulate these businesses, to break up the monopolies, to change the incentives of how these things are done.

But that doesn't seem to be likely on the horizon anytime soon.

So what are your thoughts?

Maybe it is big.

We need the big change.

But what are your thoughts on how.

Do we start to chip away at this problem?

What are some things that, what are some changes maybe that we could do?

And maybe there's some behavioral changes in us as the audience as well.

Right.

Like we all just got to maybe kick some of.

The.

Kick some of this stuff, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think the, I think kicking the habit is a good thing.

Like we mentioned earlier, if somebody's aiming science at you, start to interrogate why, you know who's behind it and talk about.

And think about the motivations for doing that.

One of the other things we mentioned in as a solution is there used to be something called the version of record where somebody made a scientific claim and you had one version of that and the Internet was perfect for that.

Right.

Because you could point from anywhere to that version of record.

But we've, we flipped it around and we now make a.

What we call the automated box of confusion, which is all these copies get sent out, sent all over the place.

And then there are multiple versions of any article in many cases.

And it.

We need to get back to, there's one claim, one version of the claim that is managed and curated by the publisher and in partnership with the authors.

And then we also think that copyright needs to be re.

Embraced as a democratic norm, because it is a democratic norm.

And having that natural right as an author is Important and putting it in the hands you think are best positioned to defend it is a choice that you should think about.

And then we also think that science.

Is a community practice, it's a community affair.

And so the scientific community should be, you know, you should know who they, you know, who's doing what and who's accountable, who the editors are and all of that.

You should know where the money's coming from.

But they should be able to work in community without being harassed by political forces.

And that gets kind of to the Russell Vaught OMB nonsense, which is the extreme end of the other spectrum.

Extreme, other end of the spectrum.

Before I talked to Kent, I talked to a very important person in scientific publishing and I was saying, I don't know what I should do next.

And he's like, if I were you, I would start a journal and charge subscriptions.

That's basically what we're getting back to is the, the use of the Internet to make things open and free.

And that has turned into a lot of back ended corruption and nonsense.

And we know that not all publishers are going to go back to just charge the people who want to read your information at a fair price.

And if they don't like it, then they can cancel.

I mean, that's not going to happen, but it could happen.

And I think that's something that people who are consumers of scientific information, if they are prompted with a so called paywall, that's a good thing because that information is, is for you.

If, if you have somebody, either if you can pay for it or if you have a job that pays for it, that makes sense.

And we see that in other disciplines that haven't gone to this, you know, free model.

Yeah, you get what you pay for.

Right.

The other thing that's interesting, Brad, is in writing the book, we had to revisit some of the language from the.

And I personally think the business books.

They totally got, they got everything.

They were crazy.

We go back and read them sometimes.

You're like, man, there was a lot.

Of cocaine going on in that world.

I don't know, some of these people.

Were pretty hyped up.

But you go back and read some of the language that led to these positions and it, it's absurd.

It really is just absurd.

And out of, you know, just, you can see how it happened.

You know, then that's part of the reason we wrote the book is we wanted to connect the dots and say you know, this didn't come out of nowhere.

This, you know, wasn't, you know, this could, you could have, you, you saw the, the, you know, the bushes rattling and the eyes and the trees and you know that you heard the, you know, the breath in the woods and it's like, okay, now you're under attack.

But it, you know, here were the early indications that something was, you know, somebody was coming for, for science.

And, and it's, it's all the cyber libertarian Internet warriors who want to extract what they can and, and have a whole bunch of techniques to try to centralize truth.

And I think that's the last thing is we have to keep science decentralized.

It needs to, it can't.

If once you centralize information, it becomes manipulatable.

But when you have multiple points of comparison and when you can adjudicate it yourself, if you're in that field, that's a much healthier information environment.

Yeah.

And again, in a way it's almost counterintuitive in some, some ways like you want that decentralization, but you also need experts, you know, that are, that are placed in these.

Yeah.

You want it to be based on really good information.

And then I think one of the things that we lost along the way is this idea that experts can find other experts.

They still know how to find other experts.

If you're, if you're doing research, if you know who to call, you know who you're, your fellow scientists or investigators are.

And this idea that everything has to be like splashed out on the Internet for anybody to scrape up is kind of a nonsense.

In the same way that a lot of the social media and other things that we've seen play out.

We don't need to engineer technology to help people find other like minded people.

We found that the more that we've done that, the, the worst outcomes have come.

And the, the best part of, you know, scientific inquiry and academic exploration comes between like nerds who find other nerds.

And you can do that without having the whole Internet.

I would, I would, I would hazard, get hazard a guess that it's like the Internet hasn't changed how researchers are meeting and stuff.

Like you have your networks that you, yeah.

Conferences.

Right.

And your supervisor when you're coming up, the people that mentor you in this, like, though that's how people are, it's not because they're typing into, you know, Claude or whatever who's doing this.

Yeah.

So here's a thought experiment.

Let's say they turned it off.

That'd be fine.

Yeah, and so, but, and so, so.

System would get a.

You make more phone calls.

But you know what the, the, the kind of to dumb this whole conversation down to a nutshell is the people are making money off of the opposite of that.

They're making money off of high volume publication, high attention economy, all the things that don't matter, the extractive nature of the Internet and scientific and academic information.

Whereas the real people who are doing the real work are doing their own thing on the side.

Mm.

Yeah.

And I think maybe, you know, it's.

Again, scientists always have this tough, you know, they don't want to be.

There's.

They're so desperate to be seen as like neutral, you know, but it's.

Well, I think maybe there's a time where you have to stand up for the values of your community and these kind of things.

And maybe scientists themselves can be a bit more push back against some of these publishing practices and stuff.

Yeah, they're starting to.

I mean, they're starting to.

It's been interesting to watch.

Colette Delawalla of Stand up for Science has been a real champion of, you know, this, and Beth Jacobs of Defending Public Health as well.

And there are others.

But what's been interesting to watch is.

So I used to work at aaas, the American association for the Advancement of Science.

And so I know a little bit about what it's like inside those walls.

And the editor in chief was a little reluctant to, you know, engage.

He's not in reluctant anymore.

He's on her podcast.

He's saying, yeah, we need.

So I think, I think that the tide is turning in some ways.

There are some legal cases that have gone against Meadow recently.

There are more looming.

I think, you know, parents are tired of it.

There's more phone free schools kids have seen are now turning into politicians.

And they're the kids who saw their, their classmates struggling with, you know, the pressures of social media and the depression that it could.

And isolation it could inculcate.

They've survived the pandemic and they saw how that harmed relationships and people and politicized science.

And so I think there's a rising tide of awareness and our hope, my hope at least I think our hope is our book kind of shows that even, you know, how science got to where it is in this whole mix and how to fix it in some important ways.

Yeah, I agree.

As we, as we wrap it up here, it does feel like there's a bubbling, you know, whether that's anger that's turning into Some action or something like that.

There is some pushback and it's.

And it is kind of really in a lot of aspects of our lives.

Right.

These companies, these tech things have kind of dominated for quite a long time and it's maybe time where everybody sort of had enough and waking up.

So I think it's.

Yeah, I think the book lands at a, at a.

The right moment.

So I. Congratulations on, on finishing and getting it out there and I hope that, yeah, it does well for you and, and that.

And I, Yeah, I'll say thanks for writing it and to the listener.

We haven't even covered, you know, half of it.

There's so much.

And I actually, I'll give another plug for the book because I, I love that there was all of this, you know, international intrigue and stuff in there.

Like it's a really fascinating story and it's.

When you hear academic publishing, you know, I could see the eyes rolling back.

Right.

And.

But it's not.

There's.

It.

It really touches on a lot.

And that's why again, I'll bring it back to that opening quote that you use for part one of the book because that really sets the stake as to what we're dealing with here.

And we don't often think about those kind of things as much.

But it was, yeah, it was an interesting read and yeah, thank you for, thank you for taking the time to, to talk about it and perhaps there's some follow ups we can do in the future.

It was a real pleasure.

Yeah, sure thing.

Yeah.

Once you.

Yeah, once people get to read it, let's talk about the dirty criminals and all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean I was surprised to see Epstein make an appearance, but then I was like.

Going back and forth.

You know, Ghislaine, there's a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

I knew of her father's publishing past, but I didn't realize the connection to academic publishing and stuff.

And so I was like.

But okay, so yeah, so for those who want to find it, where can they find the book?

And I will put it all in the show notes as well.

But maybe what's the easiest way for people to engage with it?

Yeah, so our website is disruptedscience.com and we have links to all of the online retailers.

And then it should be in.

It's got a good review from Library Journal.

So it should be in a library.

Near you, we hope, and hopefully at a bookstore near you.

And if not special, order 12 of them and you can give them to.

All your friends anywhere that you get books.

I don't like to support too many tech platforms, but the tech platform, yeah,.

Barnes and Noble would be a good.

Understood, understood.

And you know, you, you get what you pay for, so it's, it's worth the price of admission.

So once again, thank you for taking the time.

I appreciate it.

And best of luck with it.

Awesome.

Thanks, Brad.

Thanks, Brad.

There you have it.

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