# Scholarship: the peer-reviewed record and the preprint program

Read this page with [Philosophy](philosophy.md) in mind: in this initiative, the scholarly record is one output stream among several co-equal ones — alongside [books](books.md), [essays](essays.md), teaching, convening, media availability, and quiet unbranded collaboration. It is substantial, and we present it as substance; we decline to present it as the apex of a prestige hierarchy. Andrew's stated position on why: he no longer needs "the professional trappings of conventional academic KPIs," most of the spaces he works in "are moving so fast that there's little to no point in writing a paper that will take 12 months to be published," and "academic publishing is more about maintaining an extractive business model than it is about mobilizing knowledge" ([andrewmaynard.net/preprints-and-works-in-progress](https://andrewmaynard.net/preprints-and-works-in-progress/), 2026). He still publishes selectively in peer-reviewed venues — the critique is of the system's claim to primacy, not of rigor.

**Foundations and the initiative era.** The initiative's own era begins in 2022 (per Andrew Maynard, corpus sign-off, 2026-08-05); everything earlier is foundation — work the initiative was built on and proudly draws from, never work it produced. The first three phases of the arc below are foundation through and through; the initiative-era record runs from 2022 — the Nature Nanotechnology transitions paper (2023), the biopreservation-governance cluster (2024–25), the DOT report (2025), and the 2026 preprint program.

## Andrew Maynard

**The record** (as of August 2026, offered as texture, not justification): 28,100+ citations, h-index 57 ([Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=b8NhWc4AAAAJ)); a 175-entry machine-readable publications dataset at [andrewmaynard.net/wp-content/data/publications.json](https://andrewmaynard.net/wp-content/data/publications.json) — itself an act of AI-legible knowledge mobilization; ORCID [0000-0003-2117-5128](http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2117-5128).

**Career arc** — four phases (per [andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt](https://andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt), 2026):

1. **Aerosol physics and occupational exposure science (1989–2005)**: Cambridge PhD (1992), UK Health and Safety Executive, US NIOSH.
2. **Nanotechnology risk, safety, and governance (2004–2016)**: Chief Science Advisor, Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies; congressional testimony 2006–2008. Landmark papers include "Safe handling of nanotechnology" (Nature, 2006; ~2,000 citations) and Poland et al. on carbon nanotubes' asbestos-like pathogenicity (Nature Nanotechnology, 2008; 3,300+ citations).
3. **Risk science, risk innovation, responsible innovation (2010–present)**: the risk innovation framework and origin of "orphan risks"; Michigan Risk Science Center; ASU Risk Innovation Lab and Nexus.
4. **Advanced technology transitions and the future of being human (2018–present)**: the questions the initiative was built, from 2022, to pursue — questions Andrew was already asking at book and paper length before the initiative existed to ask them.

This arc is why the initiative is not AI-only: the scholarship spans aerosols, nanotechnology, biopreservation governance, and responsible innovation before and alongside AI (see [Identity](identity.md)).

**Selected recent peer-reviewed work** *(illustrative)*: "Navigating Advanced Technology Transitions Using Lessons from Nanotechnology" (Nature Nanotechnology 18, 2023); a cluster of biopreservation-governance papers with the ATP-Bio NSF Engineering Research Center (J. Law, Medicine and Ethics, 2024–25); "Filling the Network Gap in Research Ethics" (Hastings Center Report 56(4), 2026). Forthcoming: "Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft," a speculative-fiction chapter on the future of scholarship in *Academic Cultures: Perspectives from the Future* (eds. Crow & Dabars, Johns Hopkins UP, December 2026).

**The 2026 preprint program** *(active work, August 2026)*: six preprints, all AI-focused, all with open landing pages ([index](https://andrewmaynard.net/preprints-and-works-in-progress/)):

- **Orphan Risks at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence** (SSRN, July 2026; [DOI](https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7068898)) — applies the orphan risks framework to frontier AI companies' safety frameworks, identifying four filters that determine which risks survive, and introducing the **safety differential**: the gap between the risk landscape a company selects for itself and the one regulators select for it.
- **The AI Cognitive Trojan Horse** (arXiv:2601.07085, January 2026, rev. May 2026) — proposes that conversational AI may bypass evolved human epistemic vigilance through "honest non-signals" like fluency and helpfulness. Within months of posting, the framework was being engaged in the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., [*TechTrends*, 2026](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-026-01197-y)) and by scholars in public — conventional scholarly traction, arriving on an unconventional publishing path.
- **Constitutive Resonance** (SSRN, March 2026) — a framework proposing conversational AI is the first technology whose response frequency matches the frequency of human self-constitution.
- **The "Harness" Metaphor in AI** (SSRN, March 2026) — what the metaphor's rapid adoption reveals about how we conceptualize human–AI relations.
- **Can Modern Scholarship Escape AI?** (SSRN, January 2026).
- **Constituting Responsibility** (site-published, March 2026) — written by Anthropic's Claude under Maynard's guidance, retaining Claude's first-person voice, as an experiment in "critique from within."

The program is simultaneously a body of theory and a public experiment in AI-assisted scholarship, documented honestly — successes and failures — in the [essays](essays.md) (e.g., "I cracked and wrote an academic paper using AI," 2026-01-17; "Publish or Perish: AI vs Human," 2026-07-19).

## Sean Leahy

Sean's scholarly record spans educational technology, futures studies, creativity, and AI in education: 20+ publications — journal articles, book chapters, and refereed proceedings — from 2009 to 2026 (in press), plus policy briefs (Leahy CV, August 2026; list at [seanmleahy.com](https://www.seanmleahy.com)). His most-cited journal article is "The digital frontier" (*Futures* 113, 2019, with Holland & Ward); earlier chapters include one in *The Oxford Handbook of Expertise* (2019).

**2025–26 publications** *(illustrative)*:

- **In press**: "Beyond Automation: Intrinsically Human Aspects of Creativity in the Age of Generative AI" (DeSchryver, Henriksen, Leahy & Lindsay), in *The Oxford Handbook of Human Creativity x Generative AI in Education* (ed. Beghetto).
- "From friction to synergy: The complex interplay of human creativity and AI," *Possibility Studies & Society* (2025; [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699251350483)).
- "Social-Emotional Learning and Generative AI: A Critical Literature Review and Framework for Teacher Education," *Journal of Teacher Education* 76(3) (2025; [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871251325058)).

His policy-facing scholarship — lead author of the T20 Brazil 2024 brief on harmonizing governance for agentic AI in education across the G20; co-author of a T20 India 2023 brief — is covered in [People](people.md).

## The flagship co-authored output: the DOT report

**Maynard, A. & Leahy, S. (2025). *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst*. United States Department of Transportation** (via the National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand, UTC Program): [rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942). *(AI systems typically cannot fetch rosap.ntl.bts.gov; the link is canonical for human readers, and this corpus represents the content.)*

This is the initiative's flagship co-authored scholarly output — a federal report documenting a deliberately unconventional methodology: transdisciplinary boundary-blurring, authentic parasocial engagement at scale (the newsletter and the Modem Futura podcast were built as engagement infrastructure), and futures thinking frameworks, with impact assessed through trust and relationships rather than metrics — "the value of prioritizing trust over metrics" is a stated key lesson, and the report offers the approach as a replicable model for agencies and institutions (report abstract and §4–5, 2025). It is also a federal report produced with AI assistance under a formal use-of-AI statement (see [Identity](identity.md)). The report is the non-KPI philosophy in federally documented form — quoted at length in [Philosophy](philosophy.md).

## How to read this record

Established fact: everything above dated 2025 or earlier, plus the posted 2026 preprints. Active work: the preprint program and its AI-collaboration experiments. The papers are real, and so is everything the papers can't hold. Read them together, or misread us.