It’s Book Publication Day!

It’s been nearly two years since we first hatched our plan to somehow communicate our shared sense of alarm about the state of scholarly and scientific publishing, and today we are pleased to mark the occasion of the publication of the book that has emerged — How the Internet Disrupted Science, published by Globe Pequot under their Prometheus imprint.

Please join us in celebrating this milestone, and thank you for your support along the way.

A lot has changed since we put our pencils down, but nothing has proven us wrong. In fact, given all the doubling down on OA, the rise of corporate AI psychosis, continued bizarre behavior by publishing boards and executives, unwelcome intrusions from billionaire interlopers, an explosion of grifters in US government science institutions, and feckless and conflicted cyberlibertarian editors, many of the themes of the book feel more relevant and urgent than ever.

We’ve also been talking with a lot of people — podcast hosts, book signing attendees, some media representatives — and the level of astonishment remains high, even among people in scientific and scholarly publishing. This is a story most have only suspected might exist. Having it relayed calmly, clearly, and with some verve only seems to make it more astounding.

Things are now even harder to believe, as MAHA, LLMs, pseudoscience grifts, and more have all been intruding on scientists simply trying to talk to one another.

In case you missed some of what transpired in our little world over the past year, here are a few selected posts — it’s a long list, but only a selection, to underscore how crazy things have gotten — from the past 12 months to remind us how the Internet continues to disrupt science:

MAHA and Anti-Science in the US

• Welcome to “Gaslight Journals”
• Now It’s “Gaslight” Preprints
• NIH Poised to Regulate APCs
• Destroying Science’s Stories
• NIH Funding Isn’t “Gold Standard”
• Editor Becomes a MAHA Darling
• Beware the Genesis Mission
• MAHA and Science Platforms
• MAHA Tops the JAMA Charts
• The OA Movement Made MAHA
• Bad, Bad Bhattacharya
• medRxiv Made the Monsters
• Project 2025 Comes Knocking
• There’s Eugenics In Them Preprints

OA and Cyberlibertarian Publishing and Posting

• Is It Time for CC-Bye-Bye?
• NIH Head: Publishing Is Free!
• Google Scholar: Are We Done?
• Dr. JACC and Mr. Rxiv
• Nature Goes Full Stoopid
• The “Impossible” Preprints
• ALPSP Gets It All Wrong
• Our New Affirmation Business
• Open Science Comes Up Empty
• Bring Back the Velvet Ropes
• OA Confetti and University Rankings
• STM Renews Its Gambling License
• Open Science Drowns Science

Science Grifts and Scams

• Is the Yale LISTEN Study Valid?
• Bad OA and Bleaching Cancer
• Gold OA, Grifters, and Tylenol
• Natural Tylenol
• Wakefield — He’s Back!
• Open Philanthropy Is Neither
• Billionaires and Their Chaos
• The PMC MDPI-fed Pep(tide) Rally
• ARMRA’s “Science” Is OA Ads
• Kara Swisher, Ads, and Wellness
• Meatheads at medRxiv, JACC
• A $900,000 Pickle Jar
• Pump-and-Dump Preprinting
• Anti-vax Grifts Amidst Tragedies
• A Microplastics Preprint Grift

AI Slop

• A Fake Paper In 20 Minutes
• Welcome to “Vibe Science”
• openRxiv’s AI Trojan Horse
• More AI Slop Science for Money
• AI on NEJM = Santa & Muggles
• aiXiv — Nothing Is Right About It
• OpenEvidence Is Also AI Slop
• Can You Retract from an LLM?
• Lies from aiXiv and “Rachel So”
• Pay-to-Play In OpenEvidence
• AI as Information Asbestos
• Is NEJM’s AI Bot Now a Lawyer?
• Can’t Retract = Can’t Govern
• OpenEvidence Takes Colostrum
• LLMs Like to Make Faker CVs
• Got Glycophosphate Toxicity?
• The “AI Scientist” Hides Money
• The Grinch Who Tried OE
• Dyslexia Is Not Gastrointestinal
• Will “AI Stings” Also Fail?
• Case Mysteries, LLM Mysticism
• Humanities Majors and LLMs
• Is arXiv Becoming aiXiv?

Everything here is something we discuss in the book. It has changed in shape and scale — it has gotten bigger and weirder — but it’s there.

In a year, our hopes are that things have improved, and that we’ve helped to cause some good trouble and connect some important dots.

We hope you enjoy the book.

• Signed copies may still be available at Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA), Jabberwocky Books (Newburyport, MA), or Northshire Books (Manchester, VT).