ALPSP Awards
Applications were invited for two awards this year: the ALPSP Impact Award and ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing.
The ALPSP Impact Award recognises and celebrates significant initiatives, projects or collaborations within scholarly communication and academic research that are truly making a positive difference.
The ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing recognises any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication.
The judges are reviewing the applications and will draw up a shortlist for each award. The finalists will be showcased as part of the ALPSP Conference on Wednesday 13 September with the winner announced on Thursday 14 September at the conference dinner.
ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing
Scholar Freedom’s key features are that peer review is not essential; if selected, it is open with authors in charge of feedback; and they can earn from sales of full texts at the price they set. This is innovative because peer review has become a form of gatekeeping that threatens academic freedom, the traditional system has no accountability measures for reviewer bullying or discrimination, and hefty open access fees not covered by grants and wage theft by universities harm researchers’ livelihood. Its value to the industry lies in taking all serious issues seriously to help protect researchers from modern slavery.
Cassyni Journal Seminar Series. Academic seminars have long been an important route for researchers to discuss and disseminate their latest findings. Our new Journal Seminar Series product enables publishers and societies to participate in the rapidly growing research seminar ecosystem, opening up new channels to engage researchers and build online communities around research topics. Publishers using Cassyni to run research seminars see increased content usage and manuscript submissions.
BMJ Impact Analytics. Research that improves patients’ lives matters deeply to the funders, institutions and researchers who dedicate their resources to medical and health research. But evaluating the impact of this research is traditionally measured by standard scholarly metrics in the absence of more targeted analysis that specifically relates to health improvement. BMJ and Overton set out to address this challenge. Their collaboration resulted in BMJ Impact Analytics, the first research impact tool focused on health and social care. BMJ Impact Analytics makes it easy to find, track, and share the real-world impact of health and medical research. Funders, institutions, and researchers can now effectively measure their influence; by tracking where their research is cited in clinical guidance and health policy worldwide.
ORCA. Impact measurement for Open Access has various tools available however the adoption of industry standard metrics has been slow. OA publishers often make claims of reach/views however these lack the consistency, credibility and comparability of COUNTER metrics. SiQ’s full compliance for COUNTER standards means ORCA can provide reporting of COUNTER processed metrics for OA at the Item Level, supporting transparent reporting for publishers, authors, funders and institutions pivoted to individual items. ORCA provides a simple, fast implementation as well as key best practice reports and embedded reporting to deliver trusted OA usage metrics for any publisher and their OA stakeholders.
Schol-AR. The scientific publishing industry is now largely electronic, however publishing materials remain based on the centuries old standard of static text and images. As a result, modern scientific data is typically simplified into printable images for publication, a highly problematic practice that has proven extremely difficult to address. Our innovation uses augmented reality (AR) and web-based technologies to ‘layer’ digital data directly onto articles, converting standard documents into fully interactive digital media. The framework we created to provide these capabilities is termed ‘Schol-AR’, and a short video detailing the project can be seen at https://www.schol-ar.io/demo/.
OrthoSearch. There are an estimated 2.5 million scientific papers published yearly, not including the boom in preprints since the 1990s. Recent research suggests that academics are finding it increasingly difficult to identify high quality, relevant literature amongst this ‘publication explosion’. Our community of orthopaedic surgeons has confirmed they feel the same. That’s why we created OrthoSearch; an innovative discovery tool. Powered by a world-first taxonomy of 20,000+ orthopaedic-specific terms, OrthoSearch allows users to search articles, preprints, podcasts, videos, standards, cases and techniques in one go, and see key indicators such as access options, impact factor, CiteScore, Altmetric score and Scite data at-a-glance as well as set up personalised research alerts.
The new ChronosHub Submission Service vastly improves the submissions author experience and increases publishers’ data quality. Authors upload their manuscript, AI extracts all the required metadata, and the platform verifies this and presents the author with guidance on funder compliance and open access publishing options, including agreement eligibility, waivers or discounts, so that authors know what they’re getting themselves into upfront. At the same time, the platform verifies, corrects, and enriches the metadata by matching it against identifiers, leaving publishers with better data, and avoiding issues and unnecessary manual work later in the process.
The STM Integrity Hub is a robust, direct response to safeguard the integrity of science. Through a unique combination of shared data and experiences, and by harnessing technological innovation, the STM Integrity Hub offers a holistic approach to detect research-integrity-offending manuscripts. The Hub offers publishers a means to effectively and efficiently respond to the increasing and alarming volume of materials entering scholarly communications that violate accepted research integrity. Its strategy is to move from correction of the scholarly record, e.g. through retractions, to prevention by effectively screening manuscripts at the moment of submission.
‘Where is my Paper’ is a fast and user-friendly manuscript tracker which lets BMJ authors track the progress of their journal submissions and access their submission history with BMJ. As a one-stop shop for information about process, timings and point of contact for their manuscript, ‘Where Is My Paper?’ is a major improvement on the author experience, reducing frustration, time and effort spent chasing up manuscript submissions. Authors can easily see the value BMJ adds during the peer review process and are more likely to return to BMJ.
Edinburgh Diamond is a service provided by Edinburgh University Library that supports the publication of academic and student-led Diamond Open Access books and journals. We offer almost everything a user would need in order to publish their own journal or book, including set up, hosting, archiving, technical expertise, publishing best practice guidance, indexing and reporting. Edinburgh Diamond fosters community within the University of Edinburgh and beyond (through our external partners and shared service programmes). Staff, academics and students often work together and relish being a part of and contributing to the growing diamond open access community.
Policy Commons. Every year, policy organizations around the world publish 22 billion dollars of research in the form of grey literature. These organizations are experts on the frontlines of policy: think tanks, government agencies, cities, IGOs, and NGOs. Collectively, they create hundreds of thousands of reports, studies, white papers, data sets, media, and other non-book and non-journal material. Nearly 90% of the research goes through peer or expert review. Yet, because grey literature is not, by definition, distributed by commercial publishers and made discoverable, it is under read, underused, and under cited. Policy Commons
has been created to address this problem. It puts grey literature where it belongs: into the permanent scholarly record, alongside journal articles and books.
Bilingualism from submission to publication:
A technology-based workflow for bilingualism from submission to publication for a medical journal. Medwave and Kriyadocs collaborated to design a fully bilingual peer review and production platform that enables the simultaneous publication of Spanish and translated English articles. This collaboration streamlines the publication process and ensures consistency throughout the production of articles, making medical research accessible to a broader audience. Additionally, this partnership promotes cross-cultural exchange and understanding within the scientific community by providing a comprehensive platform for Spanish and English-language publications. The bilingual workflow model also serves as a blueprint for future endeavors in multilingual publishing, paving the way for more accessible, collaborative, and culturally diverse scientific communities.
Nvcleus resolves pain points shared by journal authors, publishers and peer-reviewers – to communicate quickly and consistently from submission to published format. Remedy to a fragmented process, Nvcleus improves author experience, facilitating speedy manuscript submission, supported by machine-led diagnostics. Streamlined collaboration between editors and peer reviewers in real-time; Allows 24/7 communication during peer review. Nvcleus is a single-source platform leveraging HTML, built on open-source technology. Integrity and quality of outputs are assured. Time savings translate to significant cost reduction for publishers with shorter windows to generate multiple published formats. Improved quality via the automated process increases author satisfaction and repeat business.
ALPSP Impact Award
Thesis Transformation and Publishing Open Access. Open access publishing makes scholarly publication process more efficient to achieve long-term impact. However, several authors need help preparing their first manuscript and submitting it to journals. To assist and support such researchers globally, Hamad Bin Khalifa Press proposed a unique project (service) that serves this category. The Thesis Publishing Project aims to guide and support first-time authors, young scholars, and fresh graduates to transform and publish their theses as an article on our open-access publishing platform. It has disseminated knowledge in different fields, including but not limited to law, health, social justice, politics, sustainability, business, and human rights.
The Encyclopedia platform is an open access knowledge-sharing project that updated regularly and open for comments and discussions. Topic Reviews, Biographies, Science Videos, and Science Images are all welcome to be published on our platform. Based on the development of the platform, we also set up a peer-reviewed periodical journal and Encyclopedia book program. The vision of the project is to offer knowledge from researcher to researcher—a collaborative scholarly version of Wikipedia. Our mission is to collect, record, and spread knowledge without any restrictions to help science readers find what they need quickly.
IOP Publishing (IOPP) is the first society publisher to combine double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review throughout its entire portfolio of open access journals. Double anonymous review is applied during the peer review process, before acceptance, and transparent review is delivered post-publication. Together these two processes complement each other, allowing for maximum objectivity during the review process, and maximum transparency after publication. The move is part of IOPP’s dedication to tackle the significant under-representation of authors due to gender, racial, affiliation and geographical bias as well as the need to address the lack of transparency and sharing of best practices in peer review.
Original Études for the Developing Conductor is a peer-reviewed, freely-available, Creative Commons licensed collection of supplemental études designed to enhance contemporary conducting pedagogy by amplifying the voices of composers from historically excluded groups. This resource presents original études beyond what are typically available from the Public Domain. While a print-on-demand option is available, we have worked to create a resource that is freely available and easy to navigate electronically. QR codes and hyperlinks are provided throughout the text to help digital users move around quickly and easily.
The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 is an interactive, visual report that illustrates challenges that arise at various points in the research lifecycle when data stewardship isn’t prioritized or doesn’t align with the needs of stakeholders in an evolving ecosystem. Taking a collaborative approach, this report was built with input from dozens of representatives from institutions, publishers, funders, researchers, service providers, PID providers, and industry associations. CCC created and is sharing this analysis with the scholarly communications community to spark dialogue and drive action.
Cambridge Prisms. How do we launch a series of STM journals that publish interdisciplinary content on topics of global importance with representative authorship and which champion diversity and inclusion in academic publishing? This is the question we posed when conceptualising the Cambridge Prisms – a new series of open access interdisciplinary journals with EDIB values and the ‘true’ definition of interdisciplinarity at the core of their concept.
bims: Biomed News is an expertise sharing system for new papers in PubMed. PubMed indexes about 30000 news papers each week. Bims has recruited subject expert selectors. They maintain reports on new papers that fall within their area of expertise. The report issues are open data. They are distributed to subscribers every week. Thus we have expertise sharing. Experts stay current with the papers and they share their expertise.
The Subscribe to Open Community of Practice (S2O CoP) is a collaborative forum that aims to develop and disseminate best practices to support all stakeholders in implementing S2O as a sustainable mechanism for achieving open access. Anyone with an interest in making scholarly communication openly available is invited to participate and those who can help expand equity, diversity, and inclusivity of scholarly publishing are especially welcome. S2O is an equitable and straightforward approach that supports open access across all fields and for all countries.
SDG Publishers Compact Fellows Action Group. This multi-stakeholder action group provides guidance and best practice, amplifies and drives action from signatories of the SDG Publishers Compact. The Compact, launched by the International Publishers Association and the UN, promotes alignment across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and action from the wider publishing sector. Since its launch the group has: - provided practical and implementable guidance through tip sheets and a rubric to help embed SDG-supporting activities; convened Solutions Summits and workshops to exchange insights and ideas and created a network of change agents committed to realising the aims of the SDGs.
The first of its kind, the Peer Review Workbench (PRW) is a specialized dataset hosted in ICSR Lab, a free cloud-based computational platform offered by Elsevier. The PRW supports systematic research into peer review by offering anonymized and enriched manuscript submission metadata of 2,000+ Elsevier journals, as well as more than 5M editorial decisions, timelines and submission/decision dates. Applications are reviewed by an independent advisory board, and researchers are provided with an anonymized and aggregated subset of the data. The PRW aims to help address the need for evidence-based studies on the peer review process, in pursuit of continuous improvement in quality and trust for research, science, and society.
In January 2023, eLife officially launched our new publishing model, eliminating binary accept/reject decisions after peer review and instead focusing on providing quality public reviews and assessments. The output is a Reviewed Preprint, which combines the immediacy of preprints with the scrutiny of peer review, accelerating the communication of research and handing power over the publishing process back to authors. So far, the model has been discussed widely across news and social media, and has received over 1,500 submissions. Additionally, a number of research funders have pledged their support for recognising reviewed preprints more generally in research assessment.
The Tasmanian Societal Impact Model (TSIM) Playbook outlines a simple, 5-step approach for universities to maximise their societal impact, especially in their local context. It emphasises the need for alignment between research published in books and journals and society’s need to address our greatest challenges. As such, TSIM acknowledges the importance of the knowledge production represented in the peer-reviewed literature but goes far beyond this, promoting the idea of partnerships with other organisations who can help effect real-world change. As such, TSIM is both about research impact and is intended to have impact.
June 2022 saw the launch of Bristol University Press Digital (BUPD), our innovative customer-focused digital platform which brings Bristol University Press and Policy Press's acclaimed books, journals and Open Access (OA) content together for the first time. Institutions, libraries and individuals can now access our 21 journals, 1,500+ books and 450+ OA titles and articles from our entire catalogue via our new platform.
Africa Commons. Africa is home to approximately 17% of the world’spopulation. Yet, research shows that Africanknowledge is severely underrepresented in digitalspaces—making up only 4% of the world’s digitalknowledge. As the global librarian community works to decolonizelibrary collections, Africa Commons is one resource tohelp close the representation gap.
Zendy is an AI-powered search and research tool that is designed to democratise access toknowledge, especially in emerging regions where access is limited. Zendy is driven by a mission to empower accessibility and affordability, and we believe in a world without barriers to scholarly discovery. Zendy supports a growing user base of over 100,000 students, researchers, and professionals from over 154 countries. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to personalise our user experience so that content is easier to navigate and people can make evidence-based decisions to reach their potential.
Fast Facts Series. First established in 1994 and made free-to-access during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Fast Facts book series is an innovative collection of over 130 eBooks that explains complex medical conditions with the aim of improving communication and understanding for clinicians, healthcare professionals, patients, and their carers. Produced in full colour, with bespoke medical illustrations and with features such as chapter key points, tables and callout boxes, readibility is at the heart of Fast Facts. Clinical titles in the series are also accompanied by a free knowledge check, the FastTest, with successful participants receiving a certificate of completion.