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17 September 2021

Mindscape Commons by Coherent Digital and PLOS Community Action Publishing by PLOS have been named the winners of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2021. David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel, revealed both winners at the close of the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards which took place virtually on Friday 17 September.

Applications for this year’s awards, sponsored by HighWire, were invited from any new development, product, service or project which was both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication. All the finalists were asked to present their submissions to the judges in July, and then showcased their innovation to industry peers at the opening of the ALPSP Virtual Conference & Awards 2021.

The ALPSP Awards finalists for 2021 were: 

Winner: Mindscape Commons, Coherent Digital

What is it like to be bullied, suffer depression, or face racism? The unique Virtual Reality (VR) content in Mindscape Commons allows the next generation of counsellors, social workers, and psychologists to explore these experiences, build empathy, and develop critical clinical skills in a safe and repeatable setting. The first and largest collection of VR content for teaching and learning in mental health, and developed in partnership with faculty and students, it offers hundreds of interactive, short-form, 360° and 2D videos. In service to the community, Mindscape Commons also aggregates and preserves open access, research, and commercial VR content for free.

Winner: PLOS Community Action Publishing, PLOS

PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP) is the first open access, collective action publishing model that aims to make highly selective publishing APC-free and financially sustainable. Through publicly disclosing and equitably distributing the total cost and margin for each journal community -- currently PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology, and PLOS Sustainability & Transformation -- PLOS aims to spread the cost of these highly selective journals amongst institutions to make them APC-free for authors. Our aim is to disprove the theory that highly selective publishing can only be open access through sky-high APCs and to hopefully encourage other publishers to consider the model.

David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel, and co-founder at Kudos commented:   
“The quality of all entries this year was outstanding, and the judging panel certainly had their work cut out in assessing each of those shortlisted. I’d like to congratulate both Mindscape Commons and PLOS Community Action Publishing for being chosen as this year’s well-deserved winners.”

Read the guest posts from the finalists on the ALPSP blog.

ENDS

About ALPSP
ALPSP is the international trade association which supports and represents not-for-profit organizations that publish scholarly and professional content, and those that work with them. Membership of ALPSP is for the whole organization so all employees can take advantage of the benefits on offer. ALPSP is proud to have nearly 300 member organizations across 30 countries.

For further information, please email us or visit the awards page. You can also follow #alpspawards on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.

About HighWire
HighWire is an industry-leading global provider of digital publishing tools and platform solutions across all aspects of the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, e-commerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission and peer review and tracking. HighWire is an independent subsidiary of MPS Ltd, the global partner to the world’s leading enterprises, publishers, learning companies, and content aggregators.