In this episode, we unpack junkification in academic research, and why AI may dramatically accelerate it.
Drawing on a recent 2025 paper by two Australian scholars, Carl Rhodes and Martina Linnenluecke, we examine how publish-or-perish incentives, platform capitalism, and pay-to-publish models are reshaping academic knowledge production. The core claim is not that AI caused the problem, but that AI lowers the marginal cost of producing “good enough” research to near zero, creating conditions where quantity overwhelms quality.
We explore how the explosion of journals, the strain on peer review, and metric-driven evaluation systems disproportionately harm early-career researchers, scholars in the Global South, and those outside elite institutions. We also confront uncomfortable realities: fabricated data, citation gaming, collapsing review capacity, and the limits of trust-based systems in an era of automated text generation.
The conversation ends with a critical question for the future of academia: if every single metric can be gamed, what kinds of evaluation systems and institutional courage are required to protect research integrity in the age of AI?
Link to article https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505084251399576
