'A tireless volunteer and industry contributor'

The winners of the 2019 ALPSP Awards were announced at the ALPSP Conference Dinner last week.

The ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was awarded to Ann Michael.

In more than 20 years in scholarly communications, Michael has made a considerable impact on her colleagues, her peers, and the industry at large. She founded the strategic consultancy Delta Think in 2005, and it has grown from a single consultant to an extended team working for more than 115 clients. 

Michael 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. She has recently transitioned to chair of the Delta Think Board, and now serves as chief digital Officer for PLOS.

Michael is also a tireless volunteer and industry contributor. She is a past president of SSP, a board member for NFAIS, a board director at Joule, a frequent organiser and speaker at industry conferences (including ALPSP), a member of the Learned Publishing Editorial Board, and contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen. 

The winner of the 2019 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing is Scite.

Scite.ai is a platform to evaluate the reliability of scientific claims. Its deep learning models, combined with a network of experts, automatically extract and classify references to a scientific claim (citations) as supporting, contradicting, or mentioning. This information helps researchers, organisations, and the public to assess the veracity of published research and, consequently, researchers and institutions at unprecedented speed and scale.

David Sommer, chair of the judges noted: ‘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 for the researcher.’

Pictured above are Ann Michael and Josh Nicholson of Scite.