Award for HighWire founding director

HighWire's founding director, John Sack, has been awarded the 2011 CSE Award for Meritorious Achievement from the Council of Science Editors. The award for Meritorious Achievement is the highest honour that the CSE bestows, highlighting the contributions and efforts of an individual towards improving scientific communication.

'I want to express my sincere respect and admiration for John's accomplishments,' said Michael Keller, Stanford University librarian and publisher of HighWire Press. 'John Sack has always been a big thinker, whose forte is envisioning new ways to improve scholarly communication by using emerging tools and technologies. All of us here at Stanford are delighted with this well deserved recognition by the CSE.'

'According to our studies, researchers care more about how to select, extract, skim, absorb, and manage publishers' information into their own daily tasks and workflow than how to locate information,' said John Sack in his acceptance speech. 'Thus the big imaginative leap is to understand that we are a cog in somebody else's machine, or, more simply, that you are part of a workflow organised by and driven by somebody else. If we want to be efficient and provide excellent service, we must pay attention to the researcher’s workflow, not just our own.'