Today I write my last blog post as CEO of ScienceOpen. I will be leaving at the end of the month, but I am certain that ScienceOpen will continue to thrive and develop with new leadership. I have worked hard to realize our vision, and I am very proud of the ScienceOpen platform. But after 12 years, I need to take a break.

ScienceOpen has come a long way since we started in 2013. The founders, Alexander Grossmann and Tibor Tscheke, and I sat around a table with a blank white board and the goal of re-thinking scholarly publishing. Our original idea was to publish an open access mega-journal with open, community peer review and a robust infrastructure for versioning. It is great to see us returning to this idea with open peer review services on our preprints and a publication option in our journal ScienceOpen Research.

New journals are always hard to start – even if they don’t have a radically new workflow – so we were interested from the beginning in exploring and exposing the network of citations and connections around a research paper to support authors and increase visibility. Over the years this network took on an increasingly central role – we have now indexed over 100 million articles and work with a wide range of partners and integrations such as ORCID, CLOCKSS, Altmetric, SciELO, Crossref, Datacite, Scite.ai, Unpaywall, SciScore, DOAJ, and others. This led to a business model of providing discovery services to publishers that is still one of the main pillars of our business. I am deeply grateful to every publisher who worked with us. Especially at the beginning it was fantastic to have feedback and support from publishers such at Thieme, Karger, Hogrefe, De Gruyter, Open Library of Humanities, PeerJ, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, BMJ, Dove Medical Press, Emerald, Annual Reviews, the Microbiology Society, EDP Sciences, Higher Education Press, Michigan Publishing, JMIR, PLOS, Qatar University Press, and many, many others. I learned something from every single discussion and every project made the platform better. I hugely appreciated working together with Stuart Cooper in sales for nearly 8 years and I am very happy that he will continue to lead the global business development for ScienceOpen. We had such good times meeting people at book fairs in Frankfurt and London or conferences from ALPSP to OASPA to SSP. Stuart was sure to know the best places to network over beers.

As we expanded our services from discovery to hosting and publishing, we found ourselves back at our journal roots. It was a great pleasure working with a range of stakeholders to set up new journals. The UCL Open Environment journal took our open peer review idea to the next level and hosting all of the UCL Press journals in a dedicated subdomain helped us to improve our system. Others like UNISA Press picked up the baton on open review of preprints with UnisaRxiv. We refined our journal hosting with the Wits Journal for Clinical Medicine and the BCS EWIC conference series which has had almost 7 million views. We are very proud to have helped launch the Journal of Disability Research from the King Salman Center for Disability Research and the Airbursts and Cratering Impacts by the Comet Research Group among others. Working to help 23 Pluto Journals in the social sciences go fully open taught us a great deal. And when the journal Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE)decided to go fully Open Access for their 50^th anniversary with a move from Taylor&Francis to ScienceOpen it was a big milestone for us. And having the opportunity to set up the publishing portal Drug Repurposing Central for the EU project REPO4EU has been a huge honor. I would also like to give a shout-out to Morgan Lyons of Compuscript who has been an excellent partner, providing typesetting and editing services, support with the Chinese markets and good advice. I cannot mention every customer and project here, but I would like to say thanks to everyone who gave us a chance and participated with ScienceOpen on our journey.

At each step of the way I was supported by my colleague and friend Nina Tscheke who tirelessly set up collections, checked metadata and worked with customers to ensure that they were happy with our services. Nina is deeply committed to our open science mission, and I am very happy that she has joined the management team as COO and will take over many of my roles. Péter Berko who has been the motor of innovation behind the scenes, leading our development team in Budapest, has become a managing director for ScienceOpen. Alexander Grossmann, ScienceOpen co-founder, will also be taking a more active role in managing the company. I am very proud of what we have built together, and I wish the new management team great success taking ScienceOpen to the next level.

I am indebted to so many people who worked at ScienceOpen over the years. I cannot thank them all individually here, but a few deserve special mention – Sebastian Alers was our first editor and Liz Allen our first marketing manager, Agata Morka, whose designs I still use today, Sarah Goodrum, Andreas Pithis, Dan Cook, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Eric Riemenschneider, Nana Bit-Agravim, Jixin Zhou, Inasa Bibíc, Kevin Jasini, Mary Kennedy, Jacqueline Hirsh Greene, Nur Atmaca, Tori Larsen, Sienna Mayers, Marla Engelhardt, Enno Bork, Georg Benter, András Parditka, Balint Herczeg, and Tihamér Rozman. And I still mourn the loss of Jon Tennant, a powerful voice for open science.

There are still a many great features in the pipeline that I helped design and I will be following the new developments. If you have questions or want to learn what is new, the team will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair and Stuart ([email protected]) will be happy to set up a meeting.

It is hard to say goodbye, but I remain a fan of open science and ScienceOpen. Thank you for your support over the years. I appreciated every single person who registered on ScienceOpen and gave us a chance. I will miss you but I hope our paths will cross again.