Pablo de Castro, 6 Jan 2025
It was back in March 2022 when Ulrich first proposed part of the team then working on the ‚Persistent Identifiers‘ report commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange to join the scidecode endeavour he had been running for years on his own. It sounded an exciting adventure back then, this opportunity for an international collaboration across Europe to benefit from our shared expertise in the area of scholarly communications by bidding for interesting projects in the domain. And the collaboration was fairly successful too – not least the most recent one around the 2-month old report on the impact of Plan S in its first five years we prepared for the cOAlition S which has seen close to 3K downloads thus far.
However, the joint work was not devoid of challenges. With each of the three partners for the GbR living in different cities and even countries, the opportunities to meet for in-person discussions were very scarce (in fact we have met only twice over the years, once in Utrecht and the second one in Munich, captured in the pic below). Moreover, the admin-related work was always a bit of a mountain to climb – especially regarding the tax framework, especially for those of us working from abroad. Regardless of all these hurdles, it was a reasonably smooth and rewarding e-collaboration one is proud of having had the chance to take part in.
Panathinaikos-themed GbR get-together in Munich, Jan 2023
Every New Year offers the illusion of a new start though, and the end of 2024 marks the time for my ceasing to be a partner in scidecode. Mine is a thankful departure to Laura and Ulrich for the fruitful collaboration and the good moments, together with the conviction that scidecode will be much easier to manage with partners based in the same EU country alone. This is then to wish all the best to the newly renamed Herb Rothfritz GbR and to reinstate my availability to join future projects as an external contributor should the opportunity arise.
ORCID: 0000-0001-6300-1033
- scidecode: a thankful departure - 25. Januar 2025
- Choosing a data sample provider for our study on the impact of Plan S - 22. Januar 2024
- Scidecode to explore the impact of Plan S - 6. Oktober 2023