We are officially pulling down the shutters here at The Scholarly Kitchen for the holidays and we will resume posting in early January. For the last few years, as we reach this time, I’m reminded of Karin Wulf’s incisive post on “Historians in Historic Times“. As Karin points out, “We are always living through history,” and as far as I’m concerned, it’s exhausting. In our own corner of the world, I start nearly every talk I give with the sentence, “Scholarly communication is undergoing an unprecedented period of rapid change,” and adapting to those changes is challenging work for every person in every corner of our community. And that’s not even getting into world events and the ongoing assault on expertise and truth.
So to all, whether you celebrate any of the holidays or not, I wish for you some quiet time to pause, reflect, and recharge. 2024 will bring it’s own challenges, and I look forward to meeting them with you.
I’ll leave you with Tom Waits’ ode to New Year’s Eve. See you on the other side:
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.
