All winners of the ALPSP Awards 2025 have just been announced at this year’s Annual Conference dinner held on 12 September at the Hilton Manchester Deansgate, UK.

• The ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was presented to Richard Gallagher.
• Frontiers for Young Minds was confirmed as the winner of the ALPSP Impact Award 2025, with Atom Grants awarded highly commended.
• AI Talks with Bone & Joint was announced as the winner of the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2025.

ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing

This award recognises an individual or organisation who has made a major contribution to scholarly publishing. Sarah Fricker, Chair-Elect of ALPSP and Head of Legal, IOP Publishing Ltd presented this year’s award on behalf of the ALPSP Board of Directors.

Winner: Richard Gallagher

Richard Gallagher has had a storied 35+ year career in academic publishing. With a PhD in Cell Biology, Gallagher has held posts at Immunology Today, Science Magazine, Nature, and The Scientist. But perhaps his most influential work has been over the last ten years as President and Editor-in-Chief of the independent nonprofit science publisher Annual Reviews. Under Gallagher’s leadership and creative vision, the AR portfolio transitioned to Open Access, began the Subscribe to Open movement, and launched the award-winning Knowable Magazine to explain the significance of science to the public. More recently, Annual Reviews has made community based acquisitions of Charleston Hub (home to the Charleston Library Conference and new Katina Magazine) and Knowledge Unlatched.

In Gallagher’s own words, he is leading efforts to position Annual Reviews as a “public resource to promote engagement with research and enable rational debate on key societal issues.” His creativity, foresight, and dedication to our industry and community is very deserving of this special recognition. 

Richard was presented with his award at the ALPSP Annual Conference, last week, during our annual conference dinner.

The ALPSP Impact Award

This award, sponsored by PA EDitorial, celebrates significant initiatives, projects or collaborations within scholarly communication and academic research that are making a positive difference.

Winner: Frontiers for Young Minds

“Science for kids, edited by kids!”

Frontiers for Young Minds don’t just publish top-quality science that everyone can read – they go further. By engaging kids aged 8-15 directly in our peer review process, with science experts appointed to guide and coach them, they foster curiosity, both in and out of the classroom, and create the next generation of scientists.

Industry value goes beyond open access: they bring intellectual access, creating science literacy and building lifelong trust in scholarly communication. Frontiers for Young Minds believe the “man in the street” – the kid in the street – must understand today’s research, to change the world tomorrow.

Highly Commended: Atom Grants

Atom bridges a critical gap between researchers and funders by using AI to translate researcher language into funder logic. This improves access to funding, particularly for early-career researchers, underrepresented groups, and smaller institutions that lack robust research support infrastructure. It also empowers administrators to manage complex portfolios more effectively. Atom is the first solution to combine semantic understanding, automation, and engagement into a single platform tailored to academic grants.

The ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing

This award, also sponsored by PA EDitorial, has run for a number of years and celebrates any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication.

Winner: AI Talks with Bone & Joint

In an era of information overload, scholarly research output overwhelms researchers' ability to stay current. Bone & Joint have addressed this challenge for time-constrained orthopaedic surgeons by harnessing generative AI to transform research accessibility and create ‘AI Talks with Bone & Joint’. Previously, creating audio versions of academic papers was prohibitively time-consuming and resource-intensive for their small team. In partnership with 67 Bricks, they used rapid, cost-effective text conversion to podcast episodes, allowing researchers to consume medical research during commutes, exercise or other activities. This innovative solution dramatically reduces the time and effort required to stay up-to-date with cutting-edge scientific literature.

Our finalists for 2025 were:

• Thoth Open Metadata
• Embedding Transparency & Reproducibility in Science: A Scalable Partnership to Support Research Excellence and Data Sharing Policies
• Alchemist Review

David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel, and co-founder at Kudos commented:   
“The judges are always excited to review the range of innovative and impactful submissions we receive. This year’s finalists demonstrated some really interesting and breakthrough ideas. I know our finalists are excited to showcase these at the conference in September, and we offer our congratulations to all the finalists.”

ALPSP Rising Star Award

Four winners were unveiled for the ALPSP Rising Star Awards, sponsored by Publishers’ Licensing Services.

• Isobel Birks, Commissioning Editor, Liverpool University Press
• Eleonora Colangelo, Public Affairs Officer, Frontiers
• Elizabeth Fraser, Senior Assistant Editor, Edinburgh University Press
• Elinor Potts, Comms Coordinator, LSE Press

For more information about all the 2025 awards, please visit the ALPSP website.