September 17, 2020 – Worthing, UK – ALPSP is delighted to announce that the winners of this year’s ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, are Jus Mundi and WordToEPUB with the Open Library of Humanities receiving highly recommended.
The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2020, sponsored by Publishers’ Licensing Services, were presented by David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel, at the opening of the ALPSP Virtual Conference 2020 on Wednesday 16 September.
A broad range of applications across the industry was received this year, with entries open to any new development, product, service or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication. The winner had to demonstrate excellence in terms of originality, innovation, value to the community, utility and long-term viability.
Winner: Jus Mundi
Jus Mundi is a multilingual search engine for international law. It provides legal researchers worldwide with an innovative way to build comprehensive international legal knowledge.
Paris-based, Jus Mundi, strives to make International Law & Arbitration easily accessible and understandable to lawyers worldwide. It built a multilingual search engine by publishing the most comprehensive international legal database. It collects and structures global legal data that is otherwise dispersed across multiple restrictive sources or simply not available. With an intuitive, user-friendly interface powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, it allows lawyers to do their research quickly and efficiently with legal filters. Partnered with Brill to distribute Jus Mundi to academics, it also featured on Forbes Top Machine Learning Startups in 2020.
Winner: WordToEPUB
WordToEPUB is a free tool to create EPUB publications with built-in accessibility features which facilitate use by people with print disabilities.
Launched earlier this year, it an incredibly user-friendly tool which enables anyone with a structured Microsoft Word document to easily create an accessible and highly flexible publication in the EPUB 3 format. This can be read on any device and used with a variety of assistive technologies which people with disabilities around the world rely upon throughout their education, work and leisure. The tool was developed by the DAISY Consortium, with voluntary contributions from the global DAISY community of educators, publishers and accessibility experts, and with advice and encouragement from Microsoft.
Highly Recommended: Open Library of Humanities
Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a sustainable scholar-led consortial funding model for Gold Open Access in the humanities without publication fees.
It is a charitable organization dedicated to publishing world-leading open access humanities scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges. Launched in 2015, its free-to-read, free-to-publish model was set up to revolutionise the field of open access publishing. Five years on, the sustainable business model has attracted nearly 300 supporting institutions, with further revenue generated through hosting on our in-house open source publishing platform Janeway, enabling it to establish a thriving platform of 28 peer-reviewed open access journals. Its mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, forever.
Awards shortlist
- Charlesworth WeChat Gateway
- DataSeer
- Rigor and Transparency Index powered by SciScore
- Scholarcy
- Select Crowd Review
David Sommer, Chair of the Judges noted:
“Despite this year’s awards feeling very different, we again received a range of high quality submissions from a broad spectrum of organizations across the world. It was very encouraging for the judges to see the wealth of innovation and development that is alive and well in our industry during challenging times. Our two winners: Jus Mundi and WordToEPUB, together with the Highly Commended Open Library of Humanities are deserved of acknowledgement for solving important challenges for their communities in innovative ways.”
About Publishers’ Licensing Services Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) provides rights management services to the publishing industry. Our primary remit is to oversee collective licensing in the UK for book, journal, magazine and website copying.
About ALPSP The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is an international membership trade body that supports and represents not-for-profit organizations and institutions that publish scholarly and professional content. With nearly 300 members in 30 countries, membership also includes those that work with these publishers. Its mission is to connect, inform, develop and represent the international scholarly and professional publishing community.
About the ALPSP Virtual Conference and Awards 2020 The ALPSP Conference 2020 is being held virtually over three sessions from 16‑18 September. This year’s theme is the legacy of COVID-19 on scholarly communication. The conference provides a friendly forum in which to share information and knowledge, learn about new initiatives, and engage in open discussion on the challenges and opportunities facing publishing today. With expert speakers, our annual event is for everyone in the scholarly publishing community.
For further information, please email jo.hutchinson@alpsp.org or lesley.ogg@alpsp.org or visit the awards page. You can also follow #alpspawards on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
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