The Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact—a collaboration among the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) celebrating innovations that have transformed scholarly publishing—has announced the DOI for Scholarly Publishing as its inaugural winner.
The Rosenblum Award celebrates and preserves the historical record of innovations that have had a major impact on scholarly communications, focusing on technologies, standards, or practices that have become an indispensable component of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. The Award does not recognize individuals or organizations directly, nor does it carry a monetary prize. Instead, it honors elements of the ecosystem that enable the production, dissemination, and collaboration essential to scholarly communication.
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for Scholarly Publishing was the clear choice as the initial recipient of the Award. Over the past three decades, since its adoption by Crossref, the DOI has become a critical feature of the connective ecosystem for scholarly outputs of all types. DOIs ensure that research objects are always discoverable, even if web structures change or content moves. This is extremely important for researchers and the integrity of the scholarly ecosystem. The availability of DOI metadata facilitates many other back-end information management systems, such as holdings and appropriate-copy resolution via related standards such as OpenURL. Simplified reference management tools, assessment measurement, new forms of relational search, and other applications centered on DOI metadata were built upon this infrastructure. The DOI system soon extended into new domains, such as DataCite’s identification of data sets. By driving attention to the value of persistent linking and a robust resolution service, the DOI for Scholarly Publishing has vastly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communications.
The Award was created in memory of industry trailblazer Bruce Rosenblum, renowned for his expertise in developing Document Type Definitions (DTDs), championing XML standards, and facilitating sophisticated editorial practices. This collaboration between the five main membership bodies in scholarly publishing is the first-ever such collaborative activity of these organizations.
Find out more at https://rosenblumaward.org/.
Of related interest: “What is the advantage of a DOI?” on our Ask UP site.