August 6, 2025 — The Dumbest Ad Business

Paid OA has co-opted editors into paid placement collaborators within publishers. We talk about the implications of this, explore it as a cleaner thought experiment and its implications, and reflect on how dumb a business it is if the goal is article placement commerce.

Also, we discuss the related issue of why paper mills and others exist and are flooding the literature.

PNAS paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

NYTimes coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html

Provoke the Truth (pod music) — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

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