The winners of the 2018 ALPSP Awards were announced at the ALPSP Conference Dinner on Thursday 13 September.

 

ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing

 

ALPSP Council was delighted to present this year’s award to Richard Fisher.

 

Richard studied history at Oxford University and worked in London before joining Cambridge University Press in 1983. He was for many years a commissioning editor in history and politics at CUP, and then took on a sequence of managerial roles culminating in his appointment as Managing Director, Academic Publishing: he stepped down as MD and left CUP at the end of 2014. He is now Deputy Chairman of Yale University Press, a non-executive board member of Edinburgh University Press, and a member of the advisory board of Berghahn Books. Although Richard’s long and distinguished career at CUP more than merits this award, it is his post-retirement work that deserves especial recognition. Richard has advised a number of high profile groups looking at the future of our industry and is also a regular speaker at industry events. Richard has been one of few senior voices inside publishing to champion the book and the humanities in national policy debates too often driven solely by STEM. Last but not least, he is an invaluable source of generous and sage advice both formally and informally to others within the publishing community.

 

ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

The winner of the 2018 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing is Code Ocean.

 

Code Ocean is a cloud-based computational reproducibility platform that provides researchers with an easy way to share, discover and run code published in academic journals and conferences.

 

More and more of today’s research includes software code, statistical analysis and algorithms that are not included in traditional publishing. The code, analysis and/or algorithms is often essential to reproducing the research results and reusing them in new products or research. The overhead and challenge to getting access to, understanding how and reproducing the work creates a major roadblock for researchers, one that inspired the creation of Code Ocean. The Code Ocean platform allows researchers not only to deposit their code but all other dependencies in order for their scientific software code to run. Using container technologies, code execution is agnostic to programming languages, versions and/or operating system. The resulting compute capsule can then be embedded in a widget accessible within the scholarly content.

 

David Sommer, Chair of the Judges noted:

‘We were very pleased with both the number, and the high standard of entries received this year. They showcase an array of innovative solutions that touch on several different aspects of the research cycle including reproducibility, discoverability, integration, ethics and standards. Code Ocean stood out as shining example of a robust, well-executed, transformational solution to a real challenge for researchers, allowing them to build on the work of others more efficiently and therefore help to accelerate research.’

 

Also shortlisted for 2018 were:

Annotation for Transparent Inquiry  from Cambridge University Press in collaboration with Hypothesis and the Qualitative Data Repository

Dimensions from Digital Science

IP Intrusion Database from PSI IPV Ltd

Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) from AJOL and INASP

Kopernio from Clarivate Analytics

 

The 2018 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are sponsored by MPS Limited

 

Notes for Editors

About the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

The ALPSP Awards celebrate the best innovators in our industry at a time when scholarly publishing is changing rapidly. They are open to any new development, product, service, launch or project within scholarly communication. The judges look for excellence in terms of originality and innovation, significance and value to the community, utility and long-term viability. This year, the panel received forty submissions ranging from the peer review process to funding analysis to accessibility issues for authors, and from these they selected a shortlist of six. These six made a presentation to the judges, following which the panel selected the eventual winners. Posts from each of the finalists may be found on the ALPSP blog http://blog.alpsp.org A summary of all the submissions may be found on the Conference website https://bit.ly/2wAo0QJ

 

Panel of Judges for the Awards for Innovation in Publishing

David Sommer, Product Director & Co-founder, Kudos (Chair);

Andrew Barker, Associate Director, Library Services, Liverpool John Moores University;

Kivmars Bowling, Publications Director, SIAM;

Astrid Engelen, Business Strategist, IOS Press;

Lorraine Estelle, Project Director, COUNTER;

Richard Gedye, Director of Outreach Programmes, STM;

Pam Harley, Senior Consultant, Clarke & Esposito;

Jane Harvell, Director of Library Services and University Librarian, University of Sussex;

Robert Iannello, Sales and Marketing Manager, ARM Education Media;

David Smith, Head of Product Solutions, The IET.

 

About ALPSP

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is the international membership trade body which works to support and represent not-for-profit organizations and institutions that publish scholarly and professional content around the world.  Its membership also encompasses those that partner with and provide services to not-for-profit publishers.  ALPSP has nearly 300 members in 30 countries, who collectively publish over half the world’s total active journals as well as books, databases and other products. www.alpsp.org

 

About the ALPSP Conference

The 2018 ALPSP Conference was held from 12-14 September at the Beaumont Estate, Old Windsor in the UK.  The conference is an established and well-regarded forum, attracting international speakers and delegates, in which the community discuss the challenges facing the industry and learn about new initiatives and developments. www.alpsp.org/conference

 

For further information, contact Heidi Russell-Jones on +44 (0)1727 812777 or at [log in to unmask]

 

 

 

Lesley Ogg
Membership Manager
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
E: [log in to unmask]; T: +44 (0)1245 260571; F: +44 (0)1245 260935

W: www.alpsp.org Follow us on Twitter @alpsp