Frontiers is major winner at ALPSP innovation awards

Open science platform Frontiers has won the gold award at the Assocation for Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Awards for Innovation in Publishing, made this evening (11th September) at the ALPSP 2014 international conference in Heathrow.

Lausanne-based Frontiers, in which Nature Publishing Group bought a majority stake in 2013, is a community-oriented open access publisher and research network for scientists, with a community of 45,000 editors and 100,000 authors from 140 countries. The ALPSP judges said: "This innovative application of social media to peer review brings authors and reviewers together in discussion which in turn leads to better content, speedier review process and increased transparency."

The silver award was given to IOP e-books from IOP Publishing, which caters for the physics community, with the judges recognising "the boldness of IOP's reinvention of a core business, which sets digital and the user at the heart of its strategy."

JournalGuide from Research Square was given the bronze award. JournalGuide is a tool helping authors to make an informed decision about the best journal to send their research to, and is said to be "particularly beneficial to early career researchers and those working in regions where academic publishing is developing rapidly."

Also shortlisted were bioRxiv from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; Edifix from Inera Inc; ReadCube Connect from Labtiva Inc; and RightsLink for Open Access from the Copyright Clearance Centre.

David Sommer, chair of the ALPSP awards panel, said the 2014 winners "reflect the exciting level of boldness, innovation and development within our industry." Meanwhile ALPSP chief executive Audrey McCulloch commented on the broad range of award submissions, saying they reflected "the vibrancy and agility of our industry."

The Council of ALPSP presented the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing to Fred Dylla (pictured), executive director and c.e.o. of the American Institute of Physics. Dylla also serves on the board of directors of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, and on the executive council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers.

Dylla was described as "a dedicated advocate for scientific journals, working to build consensus among stakeholders to advance public access in a way that recognises and sustains the value that publishers bring to science and scholarship."