The journal GigaByte has been awarded the ALPSP Innovation Award for its innovative approach to publishing and its interactive articles and tools. Earlier this year, in partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), TDR supported an open call for a special issue in GigaByte for data papers on vectors. The journal's open processes for access to this series of data papers allowed the journal to receive this award. The series of data papers was released in June 2022; it included 11 papers with data on vectors that transmit vector-borne diseases, presenting over 500,000 occurrence records and 675,000 sampling events from more than 50 countries.
The ALPSP award is presented every year at the meeting of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and recognizes the best innovators in professional publishing communities. The award was given in recognition of GigaByte’s out-of-the-box solutions to address the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and, according to GigaByte, “to open engagement of research and to promote the inclusion of traditionally marginalized scholars.” The journal credits its “high speed and low cost” model for enabling publication of the TDR-sponsored series on vectors of human disease. “More than half of the submissions were from Latin America, and our ability to publish these articles in our multilingual format further broke down barriers, allowing Portuguese and Spanish speakers to better comprehend the implications of important work relating to the public health of their communities,” GigaByte states.
“Wide and open access to data on vectors is essential to help countries to strengthen their response against vector-borne diseases,” says Dr Florence Fouque, from TDR’s Research for implementation unit. She adds that “TDR is committed to helping researchers from low- and middle-income countries have access to data on vectors through sharing platforms, and to enhance their capacity to publish their data and make the data accessible to the wide community. To achieve this commitment on data access and dissemination, a partnership between TDR and GBIF was established; GigaByte was selected for the first special issue because of its innovative publication processes.” Due to the success of this first publication, a second call is already open and the link can be found at https://tdr.who.int/grants.
The ALPSP awards are open to any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication. The winners must demonstrate excellence in terms of originality and innovation, significance and value to the community, utility and long-term viability.
For more information about the data papers on vectors, please contact Dr Florence Fouque.