Michael Clarke Anticipates Scholarly Kitchen Session to Be “Passionate”

Our Publishing Business Conference & Expo is nearly here! With the conference a mere three days away, we wanted to give you one last Q&A with one of our speakers. Michael Clarke is the President of Clarke & Company, a management consultancy that deals with digital strategy, product and business development, marketing, and market research related to professional and scholarly publishing.

Mr. Clarke will be a speaker for the Tuesday session, "SSP's Scholarly Kitchen: Creating Community in Scholarly Publishing." The Scholarly Kitchen is a blog that was created by The Society for Scholarly Publishing in 2008 that started as a resource for those in scholarly publishing and soon became a platform for controversial discussions. It was even nominated for a Webby in the Blog-Business category. Tuesday during the session, Mr. Clarke, along with other Scholarly Kitchen contributors, will discuss the dynamics of this popular blog and offer advice for scholarly publishers who wish to promote discussions of this nature in their own communities.

Mr. Clarke will also be a moderator for the Tuesday session entitled "Personalization: Giving Users What They Really Want," which will offer insight into the ways STM publishers are working to provide users with more personalized content choices as well as useful tools.

We asked Mr. Clarke: What can we expect when a group of Scholarly Kitchen bloggers come together to debate the latest issues in scholarly publishing?

He replied: You can expect reasonably civil discourse punctuated with outbursts of vociferous disagreement, fringe theorizing, cursing, passionate debate, wild hand gestures, questionably appropriate anecdotes, off-color jokes, idiosyncratic wit and, if you are fortunate, the occasional pearl of useful information that you can take back with you and use right away (note: we are not giving away actual pearls).

For more information on the Scholarly Kitchen session at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, click here.