Projects from CUP, Digital Science, Clarivate shortlisted for ALPSP Awards

Six projects – including Dimensions from Digital Science and Clarivate Analytics’ Kopernio – have been shortlisted for the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2018.

The awards are open to new developments, products, services or projects which are both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication.

Digital Science’s Dimensions is a research insights platform, while Kopernio, acquired by Clarivate in April, offers one-click access to millions of research papers. Also shortlisted is Annotation for Transparent Inquiry from Cambridge University Press, in collaboration with Hypothesis and the Qualitative Data Repository; the project allows scholars to “annotate” specific passages in an article with additional information explaining how the data was generated and analysed, with links to data sources.

Code Ocean, a cloud-based computational reproducibility platform, which lets others run your code in the cloud and share it privately or publicly, is also among the finalists, joined by IP Intrusion Database from PSI IPV Ltd, which enables people to stop their content appearing on pirate websites and helps libraries avoid breaches of secure networks.

The final shortlistee is Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) from African Journals Online (AJOL) and development charity International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), which provides details assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices of Southern journals, providing assurance to readers that the journals meet an internationally recognised set of criteria, and offering detailed feedback for journal editors to help them identify ways to improve standards.

Kudos co-founder David Sommer, chair of the judging panel, said: "The shortlist this year includes an array of innovative solutions that touch on several different aspects of the research cycle including reproducibility, discoverability, integration, ethics and standars. That said, they are united by the fact that they endeavour to address real challenges for the research community and by doing so push our industry forward."

The panel of judges for the award includes Richard Gedye, director of outreach programmes for STM, Astrid Engelen, business strategist of IOS Press and Jane Harvell, director of library services and university librarian at the University of Sussex. 

Finalists will showcase their projects at the ALPSP annual conference in September, with the winner announced at the conference awards dinner on 13th September.