The ALPSP Council presented this year's ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing to Alice Meadows. As Director of Community Engagement and Support at ORCID, Alice has played a central role in expanding its presence with an endeavour that really bridges the divide between publishers and authors. Prior to this, she held a long and distinguished career at Wiley including roles in marketing and circulation, Director of Society Relations and finally Director of Communications. She was a founding partner of the Oxford Publicity Partnership, which provided invaluable services to publishers in the Oxford area for just under a decade.
Alice is a regular and spirited contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen and an active participant at any number of conferences and events – whether on a panel or participating from the audience. More recently she has been a vocal contributor to discussions of gender disparity in scholarly publishing through a series of talks and publications. Lastly, there is Alice the mentor. She has been an invaluable source of support, encouragement, and engagement for all those who have worked with (and especially for) her, many of whom have gone on to excel in their careers under her guidance.
For 2016, the judges announced two winners for the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing - Cartoon Abstracts from Taylor & Francis and Wiley ChemPlanner. Highly Commended was awarded to ORCID.
Cartoon Abstracts are a fun new way of visualising academic research. Each individual cartoon summarises the original authors' work through powerful illustration. This aids the understanding of difficult concepts, broadens the appeal of niche topics, and helps transcend language barriers. In the judges' view, they have the potential to transform the way in which young people and the wider public engage with research publishing.
Wiley ChemPlanner combines state-of-the-art cheminformatics technology with high quality data to speed up the early stages of the drug creation process, potentially getting drugs to patients faster. ChemPlanner lowers the barrier for synthesizing new molecules, thus accelerating drug discovery. It also enables chemists to optimize synthetic routes, eliminating potentially harmful contaminating side products and reducing manufacturing costs. The judges were impressed with the powerful functionality and potential of ChemPlanner. It has a narrow but clearly defined target audience and is an exciting example of how publishing is changing to meet new markets.
The judges awarded Highly Commended to ORCID which, in a relatively short space of time, has made massive strides to solve the problems of author identification and affiliation in research publishing.
ORCID's vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations across disciplines, borders, and time. It provides an identifier (an iD) for individuals, and open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions and affiliations, in order to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.
Also shortlisted for the 2016 awards were: An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma from SAGE Publishing; The Crossref Metadata API; and Knowledge Unlatched.
The ALPSP awards are open to any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication. The winners must demonstrate excellence in terms of originality and innovation, significance and value to the community, utility and long-term viability.
The 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are sponsored by MPS.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
