This week, five leading community associations jointly announced the launch of the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact. 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) have partnered to recognize infrastructure projects, technologies, or processes that have transformed the entire scholarly publishing enterprise. The executives of the five participating organizations released a short announcement video, which is freely available. Throughout the year, additional resources and information will be made available to celebrate the award and the recipient.

This new award celebrates innovations that have transformed scholarly publishing. The Rosenblum Award commemorates 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 through visibility, recognition, promotion and hopefully community advancement.

The first award recipient has also been announced with the DOI for Scholarly Publishing as its inaugural winner. Over the past three decades, since its adoption by Crossref in the late 1990s, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) has been a critical feature of the connective ecosystem for scholarly outputs of all types. While the DOI system has a variety of other applications outside of scholarly publishing, it has seen its widest adoption and use in our community.

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. Over time, this has continued to grow. As an identifier of objects in digital systems — as opposed to being an identifier for digital objects — the DOI has found a tremendous number of applications in research tracking. DOIs are now used to identify and link a wide range of research inputs and outputs, such as grants, research infrastructure, conference proceedings, standards,  computational notebooks, physical objects and samples, sounds, as well as audio-visual content.

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 Governing Committee therefore agreed unanimously that the DOI for Scholarly Publishing Impact was the obvious choice as the inaugural recipient of the Rosenblum Award.

About Bruce Rosenblum

The award will be given annually in memory of Bruce Rosenblum, who personified the spirit of innovation, collaboration, and service to the industry throughout his career, making significant contributions to the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Early in his career, Bruce was one of the key developers of what has become the lingua franca of scholarly publishing, the XML model initially known as NLM XML and which has evolved over the decades to become JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite, and its close siblings BITS, the Book Interchange Tag Suite, and STS, the Standards Tag Suite.

Bruce was CEO of Inera, which was acquired by Atypon in 2019 and best known for creating one of the leading editorial software systems for scholarly content, eXtyles and its reference processing component Edifix. His 16 years of joint work with Crossref earned Inera and Crossref the 2014 New England Publishing Collaboration (NEPCo) Award, and he was awarded the status of NISO Fellow in 2020. Following Inera’s acquisition, Bruce became VP of Content Solutions at Atypon, where he continued to lead software development for Inera’s eXtyles and worked with customers on workflow solutions.

His boundless energy and curiosity persisted even after his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis, leading him to become a vocal advocate for ALS research and accessibility for the print-disabled as well as for those with other impairments. He openly shared his experiences, bridging the gap between medical researchers and the publishing industry as well as promoting conversations about accessibility, until he passed away after a long struggle with ALS in December 2023. Bruce was an incredible leader, whose diligent work behind the scenes had tremendous impact on how scholarly content is created, distributed and preserved.

Virtually all scholarly journals and many scholarly books depend on these markup standards to power the production and dissemination of scholarship. An essential purpose of these models is exemplified in Bruce’s career and in the missions of the five organizations creating the award: to enable and foster interoperability, cooperation, and collaboration. Bruce was instrumental in the continual evolution of these and related standards through extensive contributions to most of the organizations involved in this award.

A website providing information about the award is now available.  The award team will be developing additional resources and information about the award winner, including an informational video as well as other educational materials throughout the year.