Scite wins ALPSP Innovation Award

The Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has given its annual Award for Innovation in Publishing to platform scite. Meanwhile the Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing went to PLOS chief digital officer Ann Michael.

A platform to evaluate the reliability of scientific claims, scite's deep learning models automatically extract and classify references to a scientific claim as “supporting”, “contradicting” or “mentioning”, helping researchers and the public to assess the veracity of published research. Scite won over fellow shortlisted candidates BMJ Best Practice, pre-print platform preLights from the Company of Biologists, and Ripeta, which automates the pre-peer review process.

Chair of the judges David Sommer said: “Once again, the range of high quality submissions for these awards demonstrates the wealth of innovation and development in our industry. Scite is important because it addresses the key challenges of trust and reproducibility by offering the reader an easy way to understand the context of a piece of research, without adding to the workflow of the researcher.”

Meanwhile Michael, founder of strategic consultancy Delta Think, was honoured for making “a considerable impact on her colleagues, her peers, and the industry at large” in her more than 20 years in scholarly communications. “Ann is an ardent believer in data informed decision-making and was instrumental in the 2017 launch of Delta Think’s Open Access Data & Analytics Tool, which contributes greatly to industry education on OA trends, benchmarks, and funding mandates,” ALPSP said.

The awards were given last night (12th September) at the ALPSP conference, held in Old Windsor, Berkshire.