The Scholarly Kitchen - The Last Ten Years, The Next Ten Years | David Crotty

"This week marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of The Scholarly Kitchen. Wow, time flies, and it’s been a rewarding journey from Kent Anderson’s initial experiment to becoming a cornerstone of the industry (9.5M pageviews, coming up on 70K comments). Any credit for this is due, of course, to the very smart people we’ve been privileged to have writing in this space for the last decade. As their Editor, I can honestly say that I learn something new from the Chefs every week.

An anniversary is always a good occasion for some navel-gazing, so I want to take a brief look back at how the Kitchen has evolved to its current state, and offer some thoughts on where I’d like to see it go in the future....

In its early days, The Scholarly Kitchen was indeed a rare place, daring to offer critical analysis of the OA movement and the methodologies chosen. Many of those early critiques have proven prescient, whether questioning the promise that OA would result in massive cost savings, to showing an early glimpse of the administrative nightmare that managing OA funds would become for libraries. The Scholarly Kitchen was the first to expose a predatory OA publisher with the submission and acceptance of a nonsense paper. And to be fair, sometimes we’ve been wrong, but that’s a risk that comes with being willing to voice an opinion and provide speculative analysis, no matter how well-reasoned and researched...."