The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing is “[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.” The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog aimed to help fulfill this mission by bringing together differing opinions, commentary, and ideas, and presenting them openly.

Opinions on the Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers. Comments are moderated, but publication of a comment does not indicate an endorsement of the opinions in any comment. Opinions expressed in comments are those of the individuals making the comments.

The Scholarly Kitchen is registered with BlogCatalog. In 2010, the Scholarly Kitchen was nominated for a Webby in the Blog – Business category.

Permissions and republication — Lately, some of our posts have been republished elsewhere without the permission of the author or this blog. We don’t want you to republish our materials elsewhere; the Internet allows you to link, so please link. However, if you’re translating a post into another language, just ask for permission first — we’ll happily grant it if you ask nicely and are legitimate. If you take a post without getting our permission, we’ll first request you take it down and, if you refuse, we may shame you publicly. Sorry, but this is becoming a problem.

How to Contact Us — We’re easy to reach and prompt in our communications. To contact us, just send us an email.

Why We Exist — The Society for Scholarly Publishing established the Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to:

1. Keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing
2. Point to research reports and projects
3. Interpret the significance of relevant research in a balanced way (or occasionally in a provocative way)
4. Suggest areas that need more input by identifying gaps in knowledge
5. Translate findings from related endeavors (publishing outside STM, online business, user trends)
6. Attract the community of STM information experts interested in these things and give them a place to contribute

Who We Are:

• Executive Editor — David Crotty is the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversees journal policy and contributes to strategy across OUP’s journals program, drives technological innovation, serves as an information officer, and manages a suite of research society-owned journals. David was previously an Executive Editor with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, creating and editing new science books and journals, and was the Editor in Chief for Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing. David has been elected to the STM Association Board and serves on the interim Board of Directors for CHOR Inc., a not-for-profit public-private partnership to increase public access to research.

Our current bloggers are:

• Kent Anderson is the former editor-in-chief of the Scholarly Kitchen (as well as its founder), a former SSP Board member, and a past President of SSP. In 2011, he received the SSP’s Distinguished Service Award, the organization’s highest honor. Kent has a BA in English and an MBA. He is the founder of Caldera Publishing Solutions, and has been Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher for the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Publishing Director for the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

• Rick Anderson is Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, and president-elect of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. He earned his B.S. and M.L.I.S. degrees at Brigham Young University, and has worked previously as a bibliographer for YBP, Inc., as Head Acquisitions Librarian for the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and as Director of Resource Acquisition at the University of Nevada, Reno. He serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards and writes an occasional op-ed column for Against the Grain entitled “In My Humble (But Correct) Opinion.” His book, Buying and Contracting for Resources and Services: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians, was published in 2004 by Neal-Schuman.  In 2005, Rick was identified by Library Journal as a “Mover & Shaker” – one of the “50 people shaping the future of libraries.”  In 2008 he was elected president of the North American Serials Interest Group, and he was named an ARL Research Library Leadership Fellow for 2009-10. He is a popular speaker on subjects related to the future of scholarly communication and information services in higher education.

• Todd Carpenter is currently Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), where he helps to organize community consensus on a variety of technical and business practice issues for publishers, libraries, and systems vendors. He also serves SSP as Secretary-Treasurer and as a Board member. After receiving his Bachelors degree in Philosophy and German from Syracuse University, Todd escaped the snowy northern climate for the warmth and sun in Georgia and then eventually Maryland. Realizing there was no lucrative future in philosophical musings or reading German literature, Todd entered publishing, where he worked in a variety of marketing management roles at the Haworth Press, the Energy Intelligence Group, the Johns Hopkins University Press, and BioOne. When not working on standards development, his wife and two small children, gourmet cooking, biking, and photography engage almost all of his waking hours. Todd is very active on twitter @tac_niso and posts photos on Flickr.

• Michael Clarke is the Founder and President of Clarke & Company, a management consultancy focused on digital information strategy, product development, and marketing related to professional and scholarly publishing. Prior to founding Clarke & Company, he was Executive Vice President for Product and Market Development at Silverchair Information Systems. Additionally, Michael has held positions at the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the University of Chicago Press. He currently serves on the board of directors for Silverchair Information System, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and the Council of Science Editors. Michael is a graduate the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago.

• Angela Cochran is the Director of Journals for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), publisher of 35 technical journals. Prior to that, she was the Production Director at ASCE overseeing all production aspects of journals, a monthly member magazine, and book products. She was Managing Editor of Cancer and Cancer Cytopathology at the American Cancer Society and was Production Manager for Journals at ASCE. She is currently the Vice President of the Council of Science Editors. My views on Scholarly Kitchen are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

• Phil Davis is an independent researcher and consultant to scientific publishers specializing in the statistical analysis of citation, readership, publication and survey data. He has a Ph.D. in science communication from Cornell University (2010), extensive experience as a science librarian (1995-2006) and was trained as a life scientist. His research has focused on the on the dissemination of scientific information, rewards and incentives in academic publishing, and economic issues related to libraries, authors and publishers. His personal webpage can be found at http://phil-davis.org/

• Joseph J. Esposito is an independent management consultant providing strategic advice, operating analysis, and interim management in the area of digital media to both publishing and software companies.  Mr. Esposito’s clients are equally divided between the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. Over the course of his career, Mr. Esposito has worked for a number of companies, including positions as CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tribal Voice, and SRI Consulting, all of which he led to successful exits.  He writes extensively on digital media, and has been awarded research grants from the Hewlett, MacArthur, and Mellon Foundations. Mr. Esposito is not related to the famous “Joe Esposito,” Elvis Presley’s former road manager.

• Robert M. Harington is Associate Executive Director, Publishing at the American Mathematical Society. Robert has the responsibility for driving strategic growth and management of the AMS publishing program for books, journals and electronic products. Robert also serves on the MathJax Steering Committee. Robert came to the AMS from the American Institute of Physics, where he served as Publisher, successfully leading AIP’s move away from its traditional role as a provider of publishing services, moving on to focus on serving the publishing needs of its member societies and AIP’s own journals. He has forged an international career working in both non-profit and commercial settings, with rich experience across the United States, Europe, and Asia.  Robert holds a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, and a first-class honours degree in chemistry from the University of London.

• Phill Jones is Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science. Working particularly closely with ReadCube, Altmetric, Figshare, and Overleaf, Phill supports marketing and sales efforts through industry engagement, public speaking, conference participation and educational efforts. Phill has spent much of his career working on projects that use technology to accelerate scientific discovery. He joined Digital Science from portfolio company ReadCube, where he held the position of VP of Business Development. Prior to Digital Science, he was the Editorial Director at Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first academic video journal. Phill is a member of several industry committees including the SSP annual conference and educational committees, the STM association early career publishers and future lab committees. In a former life, Phill was a cross-disciplinary research scientist. He held a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, working in bio-physics and neuroscience, despite having originally started out as a plasma physicist at the UK atomic energy authority. He has also worked as a microscopy consultant and scientific advisor for a number of startups and small companies.

• Judy Luther As President of Informed Strategies, I lead a team that works with publishers and vendors to evaluate corporate market strategies and to design and develop user oriented products and services. Our insights on industry trends leads to practical advice and measurable results. Prior to consulting I worked in sales management for ISI (Thomson Reuters) and had a first career in academic libraries.

• Alice Meadows is the Director of Communications for ORCID, a community-led nonprofit organization that aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in research and scholarly communications. She previously held a range of marketing roles for Wiley and, before that, Blackwell (US and UK) including, most recently, as Director of Communication. Alice was also a founding partner in a small UK business offering marketing services to scholarly and STM publishers.

• Ann Michael is the President of Delta Think, a publishing consultancy focused on innovation in product strategy, development, and content management. Delta Think has worked with many major commercial and non-profit scholarly publishers as they clarified their business objectives, defined new content products and business models, re-architected their content processes, introduced new tools and technologies, and developed the skills and expertise needed to be successful in an ever changing publishing environment.

• Alison Mudditt has been Director of University of California Press since 2011, where she has focused on reshaping the Press’s strategy and structure to meet the needs of its diverse audiences in the digital age. Alison has twenty-five years experience in scholarly publishing which began at Blackwell in Oxford, and then at Taylor & Francis Inc. in Philadelphia as Publishing Director of the Behavioral Sciences Division. Alison joined SAGE in 2001 as Vice President and Editorial Director, and was appointed Executive Vice President in 2004 where she led the SAGE’s publishing programs across books, journals and digital. Alison is a regular speaker at industry meetings and is currently Vice Chair of the Scientific Publications Committee and member of the Open Science Committee of the American Heart Association, and member of the Board of Directors of K|N Consultants. She has also served on the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers, and was Co-Chair of the Dean’s Leadership Council at California State University, Channel Islands.

• Jill O’Neill is the Educational Programs Manager for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). She has been an active member of the information community for thirty years, most recently managing the professional development programs for NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services). Her publishing expertise was gained working for such prominent content providers as Elsevier, Thomson Scientific (now ThomsonReuters), and John Wiley & Sons.  Jill continues to write for a diverse set of publications, including Information Today and the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

• Charlie Rapple is a co-founder of Kudos, which helps researchers, and their institutions, funders and publishers, to maximize the visibility and impact of their research. She is also Associate Director of strategic publishing consultancy TBI Communications; Treasurer of UKSG; and Associate Editor of Learned Publishing. Charlie is proud to be a marketer, and is on a mission to sweep away people’s prejudices about marketing and show what a valuable business function it is. She is excited by new techniques and technologies, and passionate about breaking down barriers and improving relationships in the ‘information supply chain’; her background includes metadata management, product management and marketing for CatchWord, Ingenta and Publishing Technology, all providers of technologies and services to publishers and libraries. Among many UKSG activities, Charlie co-founded the KBART initiative (which created codes of practice for the exchange of metadata between publishers and libraries) and started the UKSGLive blog (which – pre-Twitter – provided useful liveblogging of the organization’s annual conference).  In other parts of her life Charlie enjoys singing, messing about on rivers, and driving her lovely old Citroën DS.

• Roger Schonfeld is Director, Library and Scholarly Communication Program, for Ithaka S+R. In this role, he leads studies of academics’ and students’ attitudes, practices, and needs, as well as research on the changing role of the academic library, learned society, and scholarly publisher. In recent years, Roger has spearheaded the development of Ithaka S+R’s local survey service, helping individual colleges and universities to examine and more effectively serve the practices and needs of students and faculty members. He also consults on strategic and business planning for libraries and library consortia, digital humanities projects, distinctive collections and centers of excellence, and scholarly publishers. Roger has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative. Earlier, he was a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where he worked on projects related to college athletics and scholarly communication. Roger has a degree in English Literature from Yale University. His Ithaka S+R projects and publications are freely available online, and he is active on Twitter as @rschon. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes JSTOR and Portico, but the views shared here are solely Roger’s.

• David Smith After he received his D.Phil from the University of York David decided to trade life as a scientist for a life in publishing. His introduction to scholarly publishing came via Vitek Tracz at Current Science Group and then BioMed Central. He joined CABI in 2001 taking on a variety of roles around innovation. David is currently Head of Product Solutions at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (The IET). He’s been involved with the SSP for a number of years, first as an attendee of the annual meeting, then as an annual meeting committee member, as co-chair of the 32nd and 33rd meetings and most recently as Board Member at Large (2012 to 2015). When not involved in scholarly publishing, he likes to indulge in astronomy, tinkering with things, and restoring a 1960 1600 MGA that currently resides in his garage. He’s not on Facebook, but he does tweet (@drs1969).

• Karin Wulf is the director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, which has been publishing the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal in early American scholarship, and books with the University of North Carolina Press, since 1943. She is also Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, and co-chair the College’s Neurodiversity Working Group. Her scholarship focuses on women, gender and family in the early modern British Atlantic.

Alumni of the Scholarly Kitchen include (click on their names to see their archived posts):

• Howard Ratner is the CEO of CHOR, Inc. a not-for-profit charitable membership organization with a mission is to support and promote public access to and continued availability of publications reporting on US federally funded research by leveraging new and existing digital technologies that are used by the publishing and scholarly communications community.

• Alexandra (Alix) Vance is Executive Director of GeoScienceWorld (www.geoscienceworld.org). GSW is a nonprofit, digital research collaborative founded by pre-eminent global earth science societies. Alix is a member of the Editorial Board of Learned Publishing and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. Previously, Alix founded Architrave Consulting and has served as Executive Director of Reference Publishing at CQ Press/SAGE and Vice President of Business Development at Ebook Library.

• Timothy Vines is the managing editor of Molecular Ecology and an ecology researcher with a PhD in evolutionary ecology. Currently residing in Vancouver, he was born in the south of England, and lived in Edinburgh for eight years before moving to Vancouver in 2003. His fake Scottish accent has now faded completely. He lives with his wife, two daughters, and three chickens (for whom he has constructed a coop/bunker that keeps out the local raccoon gang). He was trained as a safari guide in Zambia, hunted for frogs in the Peruvian jungle, and “went native” in rural Romania during his PhD. He divides his little remaining free time between worrying about the zombie apocalypse and daydreaming about being the sixth member of Spinal Tap.

• Stewart Wills is editor and content director of Optics & Photonics News, published by The Optical Society, and previous to that was the editorial director for Web and new media for the journal Science, published by AAAS. He contributes tweets to TSK’s “Side Dishes” section and also produces occasional podcasts for the site.

• Ken Wissoker is the Editorial Director of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies, and social theory; globalization and post-colonial theory; Asian, African, and American studies; music, film and television; race, gender and sexuality, and other areas in the humanities, social sciences, media, and the arts.  He moved to Durham to join the Press as an Acquisitions Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997, before being named Editorial Director in 2005.  Wissoker is the author of the recent Cinema Journal essay “The Future of the Book as a Media Project and the earlier Chronicle of Higher Education articles “Scholarly Monographs Are Flourishing, Not Dying” and “Negotiating a Passage between Disciplinary Borders” the latter of which was later reprinted with responses from five social scientists in the Social Science Research Council newsletter, Items and Issues.  A three-part interview with him by Adeline Koh appeared in April 2013 on the Prof. Hacker blog.

• David Wojick works part time as the Senior Consultant for Innovation at OSTI, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, in the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. He has a PhD in logic and philosophy of science, an MA in mathematical logic, and a BS in civil engineering.

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