December 31, 2025 — Playing to the Consumer

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 might be more readily embraced?
• What rules might be reestablished?
• Would it be a better game?

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:

• “Organizations certified as ISO-9001-compliant must demonstrate operations that are customer-focused, committed to continual improvement and underpinned by systematic management approaches and evidence-based decision-making.”
• “Journals and publishers are currently incentivized to meet authors’ expectations — but ISO 9001 compliance means also prioritizing the needs of readers.”

Other links for the episode:

• Cloud Dancer Dogs: https://www.latimes.com/companion-animals/dogs/breeds/story/pantone-2026-cloud-dancer-white-dog-breeds
• “HardFork” interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/podcasts/hardfork-ai-science.html
• Tristan Harris interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-dilemma-with-tristan-harris/id1498802610?i=1000740817066

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 were also interviewed last week by Darrell Gunter for WSOU 98.5FM at Seton Hall.
• • Maybe we also like to talk . . .

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!

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