AAS Director of Scholarly Publishing Kerry Kroffe [Nick Leoni]
The Path to the AAS
After his first publishing role with a for-profit book publisher, Kerry joined the staff at the University of Chicago Press working as the Assistant Publication Manager for the AAS journals in 2000. Working with former AAS CEO Bob Milkey and current CEO Kevin Marvel, he found that the AAS journals embodied a publishing ethos that spoke to him — rather than a for-profit model that endlessly seeks to maximize profit at the expense of the contributors or the audience, the AAS staff sought to be good stewards of the literature, and to serve the authors and the readers.
“I’ve worked with medical professionals, biopharm, all sorts of groups out there, and I’ve honestly just not found a community that I resonate with as much as the astronomers,” Kerry says.
In addition to thru-hiking, Kerry’s also a fan of national parks — he’s hiked in 27 of them, including Grand Canyon National Park, seen in the background here. [Kerry Kroffe]
“It had always been a dream of mine to work at PLOS,” Kerry says. “I loved what they stood for.” At PLOS, he was responsible for all of the editorial operations — everything on the peer-review side, as well as production for all of the journals. Eventually, the IT and business analytics teams came under his wing as well. Kerry remained at PLOS, eventually overseeing nearly 80 staff, for five years.
In 2019, life had other plans once again, and Kerry stepped away from his successful role at PLOS for personal reasons. While evaluating future moves, fate intervened when Julie Steffen — AAS Chief Publishing Officer at the time and Kerry’s former coworker at University of Chicago Press — emailed to announce her retirement.
Now, as AAS’s Director of Scholarly Publishing, Kerry will lead and support the AAS publishing team and interface with IOP Publishing and eJournal Press, which provides the peer-review software. He’ll also maintain the various AAS publishing imprints as well as monograph publishing.
How Can We Make Your Experience More Delightful?
When you think about the process of publishing research in an academic journal, does the word delightful come to mind? Kerry hopes so, and one of his aims as Director of Scholarly Publishing is to make the publishing process delightfully effortless.
“One of the things that I’m really interested in is how we can change our interaction with our contributors to make it as frictionless as possible,” Kerry says. Part of this goal is ensuring that authors are only asked for materials that are absolutely necessary, rather than making them jump through hoops that take their time away from what really matters: research! (Kerry recalled a time when authors were asked to make print-ready CMYK versions of all their images — a task important for the publication of a physical article, but one that’s well outside a researcher’s purview.)
To succeed in this goal, Kerry welcomes feedback and constructive criticism from the tight-knit AAS community. “These journals are for the community in which we exist,” Kerry says. “I want to hear from our researchers how we can better perform for you. It’s not just about what we offer now, but what you would like to see in the future. I would love to hear if things go swimmingly, but I also do want to hear when things don’t go great. Constructive criticism is some of the most valuable feedback someone can ever give.”
Want to chat with Kerry about the AAS journals and share your feedback? You can find him at the AAS publishing booth throughout the upcoming 245th AAS meeting in National Harbor, Maryland.