ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing
Applications were invited for any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication. The judges are now making their decision on who should be he winner from the submissions received below. The finalists will be showcased as part of the ALPSP Conference on Wednesday 15 September with the winner announced on Friday 17 September.
Antiracism Toolkit for Allies
The Antiracism Toolkit for Allies provides readers within scholarly publishing with education and tools to disrupt racism and create work communities where everyone thrives. The 57-page document includes five key steps to becoming an ally as well as a chronology of white supremacy, sample equity and inclusion programming, a sample list of affinity and inclusivity groups, and a list of recommended racial equity training organizations. This is the first guide of its kind for scholarly publishing and attempts to bring into conversation the many inclusion efforts happening across our industry by having a diverse group of authors and editors across scholarly communications.
APA Open
APA Open is an open access journal platform launched in late 2019 by the American Psychological Association in partnership with the nonprofit open-source developer PubPub. The aim of the platform is to encourage transparent rigorous scholarship, community collaboration, and — through incorporation of open science initiatives — research accessible to readers across diverse fields. APA Open hosts Technology, Mind, and Behavior
and the upcoming Journal of Chinese Career and Work Psychology and encourages authors to convey their research in innovative ways beyond the static PDF. Fostering an immersive experience for readers, the platform facilitates the inclusion of interactive components within the article.
Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA)
Using AI and machine-learning, AIRA solves one of academic publishing’s greatest challenges: meeting the growing demand for high-quality, objective peer-review to certify and quality-assure research. Frontiers’ community of 137,000 editors and 770,000 authors use AIRA, enabling unprecedented quality assurance and efficiency at scale. In seconds AIRA screens manuscripts, recommending relevant reviewers and ensuring high-quality standards are met for multiple automated and standardized checks: language quality, potential image manipulation, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, and more. Its power lies in its advanced technology and interface - where users interact in real-time, offer feedback for algorithm improvements, and make all final
decisions.
ASJ and ASJ Open Forum International Engagement and Education Strategy
Building relationships with the global community has always presented operational challenges, now compounded by the pandemic and worldwide travel ban. The goal of my innovation was straightforward: strengthen engagement and learning opportunities with international colleagues by breaking down
language barriers using multiple forms of media (webinars, video, podcasts, social media). Everything we present can be replicated and launched quickly and inexpensively. Principal benefits were: engagement across 7 continents on educational webinars, promotion of journal in Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish, increase in international subscriptions, and transformation of international colleagues into journal ambassadors.
Author Graph
Since the pandemic began, stakeholders across the global research community have rushed to find solutions, causing a massive increase in manuscript submissions to peer reviewed journals, in some cases overwhelming editorial teams. To assist with the current challenges around quickly and effectively finding appropriate peer reviewers for COVID-related research, CCC developed its Author Graph to show relationships among researchers writing about COVID, the publications they submit to, and their areas of expertise – ultimately creating an aid for editors working in the COVID - 19 space who are responsible for identifying and selecting high-potential peer reviewers for articles submitted to their journals.
BMJ Reviewer Credit
Instant ORCID credit for reviews completed on full BMJ Journal portfolio. This is a hands-off, automated process that happens in less than a minute from a decision being made, thanks to development from the internal team at BMJ making use of the ScholarOne and ORCID APIs. Reviewers on all BMJ journals can now opt in to automatically update their ORCID reviewer profiles and receive credit for their reviewer output without having to lift a finger. BMJ is the only publisher to send details of review history to ORCID directly from the ScholarOne submission platform without any need for manual intervention from reviewers.
DARVi – Data Analysis, Reporting and Visualization for Publishers
Scholarly publishing involves many stages, with each stage usually carried out with in as ystem or “SaaS” based platform, e.g. a peer review system, or a production management system. Most systems have their own siloed “reporting” facility, typically producing spreadsheets. DARVi is an interactive dashboard that imports, combines, and presents these data in real time, showing a highly interactive overview of the data and metadata from each stage of the process as well as the associated user and department. The system allows publishers to dig deeper into any part of the data in order to pinpoint bottlenecks or opportunities.
De Gruyter new digital publishing platform
The new degruyter.com provides researchers around the world with fast, stable, and secure access to more than 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles. To build the modern digital platform, the 270 year old heritage publisher took control of its technology, content and data and placed them in the cloud. They now have the flexibility, agility and control to take control of their digital future. This is the beginning of a long and exciting journey which will include a redefined company culture and new business models too.
Encyclopedia
The Encyclopedia Platform is a non-profit project which provides an online, free knowledge-sharing platform. It is
innovative in that it is professional, open, and free, and it is unique in that it is committed to exhibiting academic entries created by active scholars
and updated live. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as provide benchmark information for researchers and the public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge of specific topics. Unlike other encyclopedia platforms, it focuses on recording and spreading academic knowledge
without any restrictions to quickly and accurately help researchers to find what they need.
GigaByte
GigaByte provides a new dynamic way to share data-driven and computational research. It uses an exclusively XML-based publishing system that makes it effortless to embed interactive web components into published articles. Such streamlining means including dynamics can become the standard for online publishing. Enabling readers to directly interact with the underlying research data and software allows immediate use of published research, improves reproducibility, and increases trust. It effectively brings an article “to life.” Additionally, upon acceptance, this system can convert manuscripts to online - and PDF - ready articles within hours with minimal human intervention, dramatically reducing production time and cost.
Hum
Hum’s goal is to re-establish professional organizations at the heart of their communities in the digital age. Hum helps associations and societies leverage first-party data to better serve members and audiences with targeted experiences. Hum delivers insights on the interests, behaviors and content preferences of an audience. By connecting to existing systems (websites, publishing platforms, learning, events, etc), Hum...
●Unifies data into a single view of individuals, groups, and content
● Shows what experiences drive engagement
● Creates better digital experiences via improved content, targeted messaging, and personalization.
Hum improves member experiences, and expands audiences, a key source of growth.
IOP Peer Review Excellence
Peer review underpins all technological and scientific development and plays a crucial role in tackling the challenges the world faces today. Despite this, the majority of peer reviewers receive no training, and those that do often receive training that is fragmented, ad hoc, and of varying quality. Before the launch of IOP Peer Review Excellence, no programme existed to provide systematic, subject-specific training and accreditation to peer reviewers.
IOP Publishing has met that need: providing free, high-quality training and reviewer certification to the physics community. Ultimately, the programme
increases trust in the quality of physics peer review.
Lean Library Futures
There have been two stages in the development of the library experience for students and researchers. The first saw the library as a physical building and curated collection. The second saw the library digitise into a platform of resources and services. Both stages were predicated on the library as a destination, as somewhere a user must go to. Lean Library Futures enables a new stage. One where the library goes to the user – in their workflow – allowing students and researchers to access library services and resources at the point of need, accelerating their learning and discovery, and the library’s impact.
Mindscape Commons
Mindscape Commons is the first and largest collection of virtual-reality video content for teaching and learning in mental health. The platform offers hundreds of short-form virtual-reality experiences and interactive videos to better teach and learn about mental health issues and treatment.
All entries to the Directory receive permanent, unique identifiers, along with subject tags, making it easy for users to discover these works. With a free registration, users can upload projects or post links back to their websites. It fits seamlessly into the remote user communities that institutions serve and has done the most to address the accessibility needs of diverse users.
NESTOR
NESTOR is a new submission and peer review system which overlays the EDP Sciences production system, providing a unified interface to authors from submission to publication. All aspects of the highly customizable system have been developed to facilitate processes for editors, authors, and reviewers to ensure:
- quality
- ease of use
- efficiency
As well as being highly configurable, Nestor is the first submission system to fully integrate video submissions via Cadmore Media. Used in EDPS' Science Publishing Masterclasses, NESTOR enables unique, hands-on training for PhD students and early career researchers. These inexperienced users have proved that NESTOR is intuitive and can be used without any prior experience or training.
OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit
The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit is a free resource for authors, collaboratively written by a global and diverse group of stakeholders. It provides authors with a centralised source of independent, stakeholder-agnostic information on the topic of OA books to help them better understand OA book publishing and to increase trust in OA books. Since launch, there have been 25,000 page views from 144 countries, making it a global resource. Authors are finding it a useful tool, and publishers, funders and research organisations have been sharing it with their own networks.
Opening the Future
It has been said there is nothing new under the sun. Yet, as we exploit our new digital world we find new ways of doing old things. Sometimes this requires a totally new business model. Other times marrying something old with something new is just as innovative, and requires a whole new mindset to make it successful. That is what our Opening the Future initiative is all about. The old subscription model is married to a membership scheme
creating a community, enabling publishers and librarians to work together to achieve open access and reduce collective library spend on, surprisingly,
monographs.
OrthoMedia
Bone & Joint Publishing are delighted to present OrthoMedia, the first video aggregation site of global, orthopaedic conference material. OrthoMedia facilitates enhanced discoverability of this content thanks to rich metadata and transcripts that enable indexing and improved SEO. This is the first platform to bring together orthopaedic material from different conferences around the globe and delivers each talk in an easy-to-use format, allowing the videos to reach new audiences. This exciting platform will help connect the global orthopaedic community in a new and innovative way.
OrthoSearch
Bone & Joint Publishing is delighted to present OrthoSearch, an innovative orthopaedic knowledge discovery platform. The primary focus is to provide undiscovered content and transform sparsely attributed metadata via semantic fingerprinting, serving users highly accurate insights from unstructured data that is accumulated and indexed from various sources to further power medical research. Content sources include published articles, conference abstracts, regulatory standards and podcasts. OrthoSearch incorporates state-of-the-art search and retrieval via Natural Language Query processing.
Our world-first orthopaedic taxonomy, at the platform's core, enables highly specific search results, alongside Altmetric scores, EndNote integration,
Cite scores and more.
PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP)
Since launching our first journal, PLOS Biology, in 2003 with APCs and then the first ever megajournal, PLOSONE, in 2006, PLOS has catalyzed transformation in scholarly publishing through innovating in business models and dissemination platforms. As scholcom as a whole pivots to a new era predicated on equity, inclusion, and sustainability, PLOS aims to once again innovate in both of these spaces. PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP) is one step in PLOS’ iterative approach to moving away from APCs to a mixed-model approach to sustaining open access publishing. We aim to make publishing truly open-to-read-open-to-publish and PLOS CAP achieves this through cost sharing, capped margins, and the removal of APCs for publishing PLOS’ highly selective titles, PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology.
PLOS’ Community Action Publishing (CAP) is the first open access, collective action publishing model that aims to make highly selective publishing APC-free and financially sustainable. Through publicly disclosing and equitably distributing the total cost and margin for each journal community -- currently PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology -- PLOS aims to spread the cost of these highly selective journals amongst institutions to make them APC-free for authors. Our aim is to disprove the theory that highly selective publishing can only be open access through sky-high APCs and to hopefully encourage other publishers to consider the model.
Quartz OA
Quartz OA is a bold initiative to create a platform cooperative enabling new channels to fund and support independent open access publishing. Quartz OA will bring together independent open access publishers and a community of scholars and institutions willing to provide them with financial and in-kind support. This will allow to create an ecosystem helping retain the value in the hands of the academic community and re-distribute the flows of funding fairly and transparently among its members. To enable this bold vision, we are building upon the cutting-edge technologies and approaches to organisation, such as web monetization technology and the platform cooperative framework
Researcher Profile Manager
● The Researcher Profile Manager is an all-in-one content management, analytics and advertising platform for publishers who distribute their content via Researcher’s discovery apps
● Profile Manager gives publishers and content owners the ability to manage their presence on Researcher, view detailed analytics, create and manage ad campaigns and post custom content into the feeds of Researcher users who follow them - all free, and all on one easy to manage platform.
● This innovative platform gives publishers the ability to reach and engage pre-built, opted in communities of scientists and researchers from across the globe, gathered from Researcher’s 2m-strong userbase.
ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR
The ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR embeds state-of-the-art discovery tools directly into any website with a few lines of code. Curated collections on ScienceOpen that bring together articles, books and chapters from across a publisher’s portfolio and beyond can be easily integrated into the publisher’s own website. Users can then search, filter, and sort the content with the wide range of features powered by ScienceOpen’s discovery platform. The ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR offers publishers a simple and cost-effective way to upgrade their website with attractive discovery tools for flexible curation solutions and more user engagement directly on their own platforms.
Standalone Plain Language Summary of Publication articles (PLSP)
Making the results of clinical research accessible and understandable to non-specialist audiences is vital to promote patient engagement activities and to allow their integration into future patient care. To address this need, Future Science Group has introduced a new article type – the Plain Language Summary of Publication (PLSP). PLSPs are standalone, peer reviewed and open access, providing a visually enriched summary of a recently published research article. PLSPs are written to be read and understood by non-specialists (from patients and their caregivers, to HCPs and decision-makers), and facilitate knowledge dissemination, patient – physician dialogue and the improvement of the care pathway.
The Biblio suite
Virtusales has launched the next generation of the Biblio suite of publishing software including a Royalty Portal for online delivery of statements. This latest upgrade to the Biblio suite enables customers to manage all of their products and formats from books, digital content, journals, articles, merchandise to Licences and permissions, using any identifier, in a single system. This allows them to synchronize data between formats, repurpose images and content, and increase productivity.
Customers can choose the relevant workflow-driven solutions to solve their specific business challenges and reduce the level of investment by only paying for what they need. Alternatively, they can implement the full suite in its entirety to manage the publishing lifecycle from ideation, costings, metadata and asset management, sales and publicity, contracts, rights and royalties, inventory and sales.
Built using the latest tools from Microsoft and Google, the new Biblio offers an unprecedented level of personalization with a responsive user interface, giving a modern, intuitive design and future support for mobile devices, configurable screens and dashboards revolutionize user interaction, simplify data entry, and provide a more efficient and personal user journey. Connectivity tools and the suite of APIs easily integrate the Biblio suite into the existing systems landscape and minimise interruption to the business.
Zendy
Zendy is a subscription-based online library created to provide individuals with access to scholarly resources. Current scholarly databases exist behind crippling paywalls or require institutionally facilitated access. This is a challenge for individuals across the globe, especially in developing regions. Zendy also aims to remove frustration from research by building an intuitive interface in strong collaboration with researchers, institutions, and publishers so that all Zendy users enjoy a seamless user experience. Zendy is a strong contender for the ALPSP award because it is the first case where the subscription model has been applied in the scholarly community with no limitations.