:ssp13banner:

Traditionally, the closing plenary session of SSP meetings features a summary of topics of interest that have been discussed on SSP’s blog, The Scholarly Kitchen.  Kent Anderson, CEO/Publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Inc., incoming President of SSP, and (former) Editor-in-Chief of the blog presided over the session

Scholarly Kitchen Bloggers

Kent Anderson

Here are the topics that were on the menu.

Or, expressed more in keeping with the kitchen theme:

Because the discussion was rapid and very free ranging, I was able to only capture a brief summary of each of these points.  However, details of each of them can be found by searches on the Kitchen‘s website.

• Administrative antipasto:  Kent Anderson has resigned as Editor-in-Chief to be able to devote time to his duties as SSP President.  David Crotty will become the new “head chef” with the title of Executive Editor.  Here is part of Kent’s announcement from today’s blog:
  

  For more than five years, since founding the Scholarly Kitchen, I’ve been the volunteer Editor-in-Chief of this blog. Over that time, the Scholarly Kitchen has become known as a hub of provocative and insightful commentary and reporting on STM publishing news and trends.
  Last Friday, I began my one-year term as the President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), whereupon I resigned my position as Editor-in-Chief of the Scholarly Kitchen. I will hand the reins over to David Crotty, who will take the title of Executive Editor. I will continue to blog on occasion… 

• Salad of Mandates: New government mandates on publishing and particularly open access have been enacted.  Funders are now part of the research community.  What is their role?  Do they have a role in saying how research is communicated?
• A Pairing of Funders: Claims about who to trust arose after the publication eLife was given special treatment and allowed to publish its first articles in PubMed Central (PMC), even though PMC requires a journal to publish 15 articles before being added to PMC.
• MOOCs in Hype Sauce: The debate about MOOCs and their effect on publishing continues.  It is important to be careful when quoting MOOC statistics.  It is the raw number of students, not the percentage that completed the course, that is important.  What do we know about the students that did not complete the course?  Did they get something out of it?  The danger of underestimating of what will happen with MOOCs is very great.  There is a lot of venture capital money invested with the leading players.  MOOCs are doing now what digital publishing did to scholarly publishing 20 years ago.
• A Reduction of Traffic:  When articles are freely available in PMC, readership counts drop at journal websites.
• A soupçon of CC-BY:  Some journals have reproduced articles under a CC-BY license but without attribution, passing them off as their own.  CC-BY is the least favored option among researchers.