Wiley AIs While Science Burns

Messaging is an art. It includes what you say, how you say it, and when you say it. It includes text and sub-text. Being aware of what you might accidentally reveal takes some self-awareness and sensitivity.

You may also want to make sure what you’re saying is accurate, and not a flimsy rug covering a number of larger issues, such as a potential commercial angle or an implausible quality boast.

Wiley missed the mark yesterday in its announcement about launching an AI agent on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The announcement was made in conjunction with AWS’ 7th annual AWS Life Sciences Symposium in New York City, a symposium that is basically a users’ group meeting and demo session for clients using AWS.

How exactly this is a “collaboration” with AWS rather than just a contract to host an AI agent Wiley has developed isn’t entirely clear, but AWS seem fine with being included in the press release. And exactly what has been developed seems like 2025 lipstick on a 1998 pig:

The AI agent will demonstrate how researchers can conduct comprehensive full-text scientific literature search across Wiley’s extensive journal content, moving beyond traditional abstract-only searches to access detailed content within main sections like methods and results.

Full-text searching? Wow. (And did you just admit that we’ve only been searching abstracts and titles in the Wiley Online Library all this time?)

• Speaking of which, is Wiley Online Library saying that OA content is meaningfully preferable for some epistemic or scientific reason? Or are they just cyberlibertarians playing access politics like Dimensions does with its filtering?

The collaboration with AWS seems to amount to Wiley leveraging an open source toolkit AWS has put out so companies or individuals can make their own custom AI agents, while AWS is leveraging Wiley’s brand in the scientific claims space.

There is a catalog of these agents on GitHub, with the Wiley Online Library agent coming 18th on the list.

Again, what this “collaboration” amounts to is unclear, but the bragging in the press release is full-throated, with Dan Sheeran, GM of AWS’ Healthcare and Life Sciences boasting:

We’re excited to work with Wiley to explore how AI-powered agents can enrich evidence-based research with dynamic, detailed, and verifiable scientific content. The cure for cancer isn’t going to come from an abstract, but will be derived from researchers interrogating and synthesizing internal and external data. This collaboration demonstrates how customized AI agents with trusted information sources like Wiley’s research content can enable life sciences researchers to build these more powerful and informed discovery systems.

The cure for cancer only needed full-text searching? Why didn’t we do this earlier? So many lives could have been saved if only Big Tech had been quicker to the Boolean.

There may be a commercial aspect to this collaboration, with the description of the symposium reading:

Built for Life Sciences: AI-powered Innovations Transforming the Pharmaceutical Value Chain

Maybe Wiley is contributing their full-text to AWS’ systems for a price, so pharma can use Wiley content in the AIs they build via this toolkit. (Just speculating here.)

We could also discuss the concept of “trusted information sources like Wiley’s.” The company retracted more than 11,000 papers in 2023, closed 19 journals in 2024, shuttered an entire brand (Hindawi) as a result, and has had to retract more than 200 papers from an environmental toxicology journal more recently. (The irony of this last bit is kind of tasty.)

There is the issue of the timing of this announcement. Scientists in the US are having grant funding cut, agencies are being gutted, labs are being closed, long-term trials have been abandoned, universities are under siege, and the current US Administration is clearly anti-science and anti-journals.

You might expect an organization with hundreds of lucrative and mutually beneficial partnerships with hundreds of scientific and scholarly societies would rush to their defense. One of their bigger partners — the American Geophysical Union — saw the organization spin up a resource center for members facing job displacement or funding uncertainties.

Meanwhile, Wiley has not been a vocal critic of these cuts, with a recent search yielding this:

Using the second option (“search only”), I found Lindsay Wiley, faculty director of the Health Law and Policy Program at the University of California, who had more to say than Wiley the publisher. A law firm called Wiley is also busy in the space. And Nature seems to have more to offer than the largest US-based commercial scientific publisher.

With this press release, Wiley and AWS appear to be ignoring the flames destroying active scientific projects and working scientists, while announcing “tech can cure cancer” and (via sub-textual implications) “AI can do science — so, do we need you scientists anymore?”

Instead of supporting their publishing partners, Wiley seems insensitive to their plight and fixated on things that might make them and their members obsolete.

There is a dark and disrespectful history of technologists believing they can do science better because of their coding skills, tech-savvy, or mere proximity to Silicon Valley. It’s ongoing. Priscilla Chan of CZI LLC recently wrote:

I was in conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. I happen to know that Emily is a fellow parent, so when she asked me to talk about the state of biomedical science, I drew a comparison to a topic of mutual interest.

Legos.

MIT Technology Review just published an interview with a longevity influencer who wants to start a new religion and talks about AI and algorithms in ways that seem like the early ramblings of a cult leader. The article doesn’t do anything to blunt his bizarre statements.

• These are not serious people.

We’ve seen this recently from some tech-bros in a couple of the “pump and dump” schemes cooked up to drive up the value of coins so they could cash out and make some sweet science-adjacent cheddar.

The belief that science and technology are one and the same is misleading and wrong. As Paul Goodman said:

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.

There is a lack of leadership in the US among science publishers when it comes to defending the funding of science, the stature and importance of scientific journals, and the integrity of an independent evaluation system.

• The #DefendResearch initiative calls on signatories to “publicly condemn and resist the censorship of academic researchers,” a stance too easily appropriated by bad actors who believe we can do our own research, that journals are squelching “alternative perspectives,” and who are starting alternative-fact journals themselves.

We need something defending independent evaluation of scientific claims, as well as the funding of science as vital to human progress.

Wiley is not doing this. Instead, this AI announcement seems to make scientists seem less important while elevating tech into a position it has no ability, evidence, or right to justifiably claim — as a way to discover reality and establish truth.

Coming Spring 2026