What? Summer is over already? But it just started…
One of the hardest adjustments to make in going from academia to publishing is dealing with summer as your busy season. In the lab, classes would stop, undergraduates would go away, and you could finally get down to doing the experiments you’d been meaning to take on for months. But for a journals publisher, things heat up in the spring and only get hotter over the summer (at least that’s the way my schedule works).
And so, once again we suddenly find ourselves at Labor Day, which for many marks a symbolic end to the idles (yeah, right) of summer. Perhaps it’s appropriate then, to wrap up such a busy time with Monday’s celebration of those who work.
We’re getting a headstart on the holiday weekend, and who better to sing about the working man than Johnny Cash. We’ll see you next week.
David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.