Back to Work

After basically nine months of unemployment, I start a new job on Wednesday with a nonprofit, open-access scientific publishing company. My job as a "publishing assistant" will be to coordinate between different experts to get scientific papers ready for publishing on our online journals.

The company works on a different business model than traditional scientific publishers. Instead of recouping the costs of publishing by selling journals to universities, we charge a flat fee that the researcher pays for us to publish their work and make it available to absolutely everyone. For reasons that are explained here, this is a very exciting development in scientific publishing and I'm proud to be working for a successful company that is leading the open-access charge.

I'm also stoked to be making a paycheck and have insurance coverage again, as well as to be doing something constructive in terms of a career. This is an industry that I can see myself prospering in for a long time, because while it makes use of my scientific background, I will not be doing any tedious, intricate bench research that I've found I am particularly unsuited to.

I've bought new shoes and pants so that I'll look presentable for work. Now I've just got to make a list of all the health problems I've been holding off on fixing since I last had insurance, two years ago.