T&F and Wiley win ALPSP Innovation Awards

Taylor & Francis’s novel approach to article marketing Cartoon Abstracts and Wiley’s drug creation aide Wiley ChemPlanner have both won Awards for Innovation in Publishing given by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).

Cartoon Abstracts offers a fun way of visualising academic research, with a one-page summary of an author’s work presented in a graphic novel style and often using the researcher themselves as a character (example right). T&F has produced 45 of these so far, across different subject areas, and says they work well on social media and have led to a “huge” increase in downloads of the articles involved.

ALPSP said the approach “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.”

Meanwhile Wiley ChemPlanner speeds up the early stages of the drug creation process by harnessing technology and data derived from 40 years of chemical reactions to help researchers find the shortest, fastest route to reach their molecular targets. The tool can shave time off the process of drug discovery and cut down on manufacturing costs.

ALPSP said: “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.”

Chair of the judges David Sommer, product director at Kudos, noted: “It is interesting that this year’s winners are both traditional publishers with a rich heritage and hundreds of years of experience communicating research. Both have been able to innovate and create new and exciting possibilities from within their businesses.”

Highly Commended was ORCID, which works to give a unique identifier to every academic researcher so that they can easily be identified as the author of all their research. The judges said ORCID had in a relatively short space of time “made massive strides to solve the problems of author identification and affiliation in research publishing”.

The T&F and Wiley initiatives won over fellow shortlisted candidates Knowledge Unlatched, The CrossRef Metadata API and Sage’s An Adventure in Statistics by Andy Field.

Meanwhile Alice Meadows, director of community engagement and support at ORCID, was also given the ALPSP award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing.

The Association said Meadows had played a central role in expanding ORCID’s presence with an endeavour “that really bridges the divide between publishers and authors”. It also paid tribute to her previous career at Wiley, her role as a founding partner of the Oxford Publicity Partnership, her contributions to the Scholarly Kitchen blog, and her mentoring work with younger colleagues.

ALPSP said: “Her contribution to scholarly publishing is two-fold – not just for the work she herself does to enhance important scholarly publishing initiatives and conversations, but also for coaching the next generation of outstanding publishing professionals.”

The awards were presented last night (15th September) at the ALPSP annual conference, held in Heathrow.