TURNING THE PAGE: TIME FOR CHANGE!
It’s been 5 months since I left Frontiers and started anew with Morressier. After 6 wonderful years with Frontiers, and a significant gap in my blogging activities, I’m sure you’re probably wondering what went on there. And the answer is not particularly exciting. I was ready to move on. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my role as Head of Publishing Partnerships. It was my absolute pride and joy to create the partnerships program from scratch, and build it into a department running Frontiers’ society partner journal program. I felt that I was making a real impact on the world by making science open. I had fantastic colleagues and wonderful support from my managers over the years (I won’t name them here, but you fabulous people all know who you are).
It was a whirlwind 6 years, which allowed me to really understand what true innovation looks like, and how Open Research can have a positive impact on the world. When I finished my tenure at Frontiers, I left on a high with positive memories and huge respect for the people committed to driving Open Science forward.
After a little break from blogging, allowing me to settle into my new role, I’m back! So expect more of my patented brand of blogs where I break down some of the more complex debates in our industry into manageable bite-sized, fun-filled packages.
Let’s talk about change, something that our industry handles well in some respects, but not so brilliantly in others. I recently led a webinar for Morressier where I showed this cartoon about change.
I have to be honest, this rather nifty cartoon has mostly been my experience of our industry. We all talk about change, whether that’s Open Access, open data or research integrity, but when it comes to putting money where our mouth is, sudden silence. Perhaps I’m over-exaggerating. There are always early adopters, take a look at BMC, one of the first publishers to embrace Gold Open Access over 20 years ago. Change at speed is not the problem, but talking about change and then not implementing it, this comes at a cost. Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you killed…
Right now I’m having a lot of discussions about change and cost efficiency. It’s interesting how as an industry we cling to the familiar, because the “cost” of change, from an organisational standpoint, is far too scary to outweigh the benefits. Sometimes staying with the status quo, especially when it comes to technology, can actually be more expensive. It’s a bit like turning off your central heating to save money, but then burning Rembrandts to keep warm.
When it comes to my own personal experience of change, there’s always things to learn. And of course I’m not immune. There was a part of me that wanted to put my head in the sand, only to re-emerge when the change was all over. Changing jobs can be stressful, and prioritising my mental health during this period meant focusing on what I wanted to achieve, doing it, and then taking time for myself. Hence why this blog took a bit of a backseat during that time.
Now that I’m back in action, I hope all my lovely readers will continue to support me as I waffle on during these blog posts. It’s my meagre attempt to support early career publishing professionals, and perhaps add a little something to the conversations of our industry.
Share Post
I hope you found this blog post helpful and interesting. Make sure you subscribe to MugsPubs to receive notifications in your inbox and keep up-to-date with the latest posts and developments.
You can also contact me on LinkedIn and tell me what you would like to see in my next blog post!
To support this blog, show us some love and click on the Subscribe button to keep up to date with my latest posts.
