The annual LIBER Award for Library Innovation was instituted by LIBER with the support of OCLC. Every year we recognise the three abstracts which best describe innovative work within the overall theme of each specific LIBER Annual Conference.
The award was originally intended to support the physical participation of awardees, enabling them to travel to the LIBER Conference. Due to our LIBER 2020 Conference (Building Trust with Research Libraries) being shifted online, awardees were not able to make use of their award money to fund their physical participation.
As such, in December 2020, LIBER and OCLC decided to adapt the OCLC Innovation Award to rather fund a project run by the library/institution of the awardees.
Who Are The 2020 Awardees?
One of the papers awarded last year was co-authored by:
- Denis Bourguet, UMR CBGP, INRAE, Montpellier
- Benoit Facon, UMR PVBMT, INRAE, La Réunion
- Thomas Guillemaud, UMR ISA, INRAE, Sophia Antipolis
- Marjolaine Hamelin, UMR LBE, INRAE, Narbonne
Thomas Guillemaud, Denis Bourguet, and Benoit Facon are co-founders of Peer Community (PCI, https://peercommunityin.org), together with Marjolaine Hamelin, member of the Managing Board of Peer Community In, who is newly involved in the project.
The abovementioned awardees all work at INRAE (French national research institute in agriculture and environment) and were awarded the prize for their paper entitled, Peer Community in: a free public system for peer-reviewing and highlighting preprints.
What is Peer Community (PCI)?
PCI offers an alternative to the current system of publication – which is particularly expensive and not transparent. PCI is a non-profit, scientific organisation that aims to create specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending unpublished preprints (for free) in their field (i.e. unpublished articles deposited on open online archives like arXiv.org and bioRxiv.org).
The Project Awarded
Figure 1 – Screenshot of the homepage of the PCI website.
The main task is to develop a consistent and classy design for the eleven sub websites of Peer Community In X (PCI X, e.g. PCI Ecology – https://ecology.peercommunityin.org, PCI Evol Biol – https://evolbiol.peercommunityin.org; see the complete list here, https://peercommunityin.org/current-pcis).
This will be performed by taking the existing design into account and refurbishing it professionally. The implementation of the design will be made within the web2py framework application.
The idea is to improve the currently available PCI X websites in terms of visitor accessibility and design. The focus lies in making the website layout more consistent with the PCI main presentation website and all other websites. Consequently, a central aim of the project will be for increased reach, collaborators, and contributors.
Leaders of the project: Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud
Schedule and cost: The websites are aimed to be finished by the end of April 2021. Although this is not a hard deadline. The estimated budget is around €5,000.
How did the Innovation Award Make a Difference in Fulfilling the Project?
The Innovation Award prize money has given awardees the financial opportunity to launch the project (mentioned above). The design of the project will be conducted by Kaiser Design in Berlin, Germany.
Read more about the PCI Community.