Taylor & Francis and Wiley scoop ALPSP award

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The winners of this year’s ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing have been announced as Cartoon Abstracts, from Taylor & Francis, and ChemPlanner, from Wiley.

The results were announced at the ALPSP Conference, held this week at the Park Inn, Heathrow, UK.

Cartoon Abstracts are a fun new way of visualising academic research. Each individual cartoon summarises the original authors’ work through powerful illustration. This aids the understanding of difficult concepts, broadens the appeal of niche topics, and helps transcend language barriers. In the judges’ view, they have the potential to transform the way in which young people and the wider public engage with research publishing.

Wiley ChemPlanner combines cheminformatics technology with high quality data to speed up the early stages of the drug creation process, potentially getting drugs to patients faster. ChemPlanner lowers the barrier for synthesising new molecules, thus accelerating drug discovery. It also enables chemists to optimise synthetic routes, eliminating potentially harmful contaminating side products and reducing manufacturing costs.

David Sommer, chair of the judges, noted: ‘It is interesting that this year’s winners are both traditional publishers with a rich heritage and hundreds of years of experience communicating research. Both have been able to innovate and create new and exciting possibilities from within their businesses.’

Also honoured was Alice Meadows, who won the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing.

As director of community engagement and support at ORCID, Alice has played a central role in expanding its presence with an endeavour that bridges the divide between publishers and authors. Prior to this, she held a long and distinguished career at Wiley including roles in marketing and circulation, director of society relations and finally director of communications.