Michael Jubb and Kudos scoop top ALPSP awards

The winners of the 2015 ALPSP Awards were announced at the ALPSP Conference Dinner last night.

The ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing for 2015 was won by Michael Jubb.

Jubb has held a distinguished career in research policy, funding and administration, as well as scholarly communications. In particular, he has led Research Information Network (RIN) since its inception in January 2005.  

In effect Michael ‘is’ RIN and has served all aspects of the scholarly community with honour and integrity. Perhaps the highlight of Michael’s work with RIN was his role as secretary to the group that produced the original Finch report in 2012 and subsequent report in 2013. Most recently, he has led the team that will report this autumn on key features of the transition to open access in the UK and the rest of the world.

Prior to RIN, Michael was deputy secretary of the British Academy and deputy chief executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, overseeing its transition to Research Council status in 2005. Michael was awarded an MBE in the 2015 New Year’s Honours for his services to social sciences.

Peter Ashman, chair of ALPSP Council said: 'The scholarly publishing industry has benefited greatly from Michael’s knowledge and insight and Council was delighted to make this award in recognition of this. Sadly, with Michael’s impending and much deserved retirement, comes the closure of RIN and the industry will be a little worse off as a result.  We hope this award goes some way to recognising all that Michael has achieved and his service to the scholarly publishing community.

The winner of the 2015 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, which celebrate and highlight the best innovators in the industry, is Kudos.

Kudos is a web-based toolkit for researchers and their publishers to increase the visibility and impact of published research. The judges were particularly impressed with the fact it is not a closed community – it can be used for any publication with a CrossRef DOI, works across all publishers and platforms and offers a single view for the author and publisher to see which communications channels are most effective.

The judges awarded Highly Commended to JSTOR Daily, which uses high quality journalism to drive awareness and increase usage of scholarly outputs, and Overleaf – a collaborative cloud based tool.