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 Jane Doe images and skull-to-face reconstructions. The same methods can also apply to museum and historical projects. Her work for medical examiners and cold case investigators bridges forensic science, creative visualization, and multimedia storytelling to bring human faces to life with accuracy and impact. She has helped law enforcement identify various victims and close years-old cold cases. 

We also have our “Discoveries of the Week,” which are quite toothy.

Related Links

PJ Puterbaugh’s site: https://pjputerbaughartist.com/

Forensic Art and Illustration: https://www.amazon.com/Forensic-Art-Illustration-Karen-Taylor/dp/0849381185/

GOLF: What You Know Can Hurt You: https://www.amazon.com/GOLF-What-Discover-fundamentals-swing/dp/0615268404/

Ologies podcast about paleohistology: https://www.alieward.com/ologies/paleohistology

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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 then, she has graduated from Duke and is now pursuing a Master’s in the Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. 

In this interview, we discuss distinctions between norms, normal, and normalized, dis- and misinformation, believing lies vs. condoning lies, “weird checking,” the Fairness Doctrine, and much more.

We also have our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• The paper Skylar mentions

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“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 information spaces often depends on how well those middlemen function, the rules that define their scope of action, and the incentives that guide their choices. As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021):

Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability — everywhere from scientific journals to Wikipedia pages — there is no marketplace of ideas; there are only cults warring and splintering and individuals running around making noise.

Compared to the intermediation of yore, with editors, editorial boards, and publishing staff listed on mastheads, platforms have no such obvious pathways to accountability. Section 230 has been used to provide them with the kind of legal cover that allows them to make their own rules and behave with near impunity. Attention is the new commodity, and stealing yours is the goal. The new middleman is a thief, not an ally.

We discuss these issues, the black boxes of platforms, the role of LLMs as new black box intermediaries, the long-forgotten Fairness Doctrine and its relevance, and more.

We also touch on recent news (the new STM report, PISS, and more).

Joy’s post about velvet ropes: https://www.the-geyser.com/bring-back-the-velvet-ropes/

This podcast gets a nod:

Also, this draft paper (labeled as such, thank you authors) is a critically important read because of the ideas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623

• Some background on how it came about: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-generative-ai-is-destroying-society

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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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, Rick wrote a two-part contemplation (Part 1 and Part 2) of what the OA movement might have achieved and where things might reasonably go from here, emphasizing that a range of approaches might have to be embraced so we can focus on more central issues.

Rick has also written three books, including Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Our wide-ranging discussion touches on how libraries first inspired Rick, his career journey from BYU and back, and his role in shaping discussions around OA through analysis.

We finish with “Discoveries of the Week.”

• Joy’s Discovery of the Week: https://youtu.be/zOd01sLlDj4?si=L6cCE09o-K7c-g1A

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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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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 more are suspected to exist throughout preprint servers, predatory publishers, and opportunistic Gold OA publishers.

The increasingly conjoined bubbles may share a fate in some manner, one we speculate about.

There are also some common business aspects — funding that dries up, circular financing operations, and bad actors aplenty.

Will both bubbles pop in spectacular fashion? Will they slowly deflate? Will one pop, leaving the other unharmed? Or are there another scenarios?

In any event, both bubbles appear incongruous with scientific discovery.

Where do we go from here?

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• Article on the New York Times’ “Connections” game.

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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, science-based policies. 

Topics of today’s interview include RFK, Jr., MAHA, public health disinformation and misinformation, supplements grifting, seeds of chaos to enable lawsuits, the importance of a new approach to advocacy, the negative valence of social media, and the proven power and safety of vaccines.

Also, we have our “Discoveries of the Week,” including an important study Jacobs mentions.

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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? Is some part of Altmetric coming off the rails?

And, with the Impact Factor producing confusing results, is it time to look beyond current metrics?

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

• Interview with Dr. Fay-Wei Li, Duke
• Gaga Fern

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