Social bookmarking and tagging applied to make the sharing of scientific information easier is seen as a significant innovation by Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
Connotea, a free online reference management service for scientists, developed by Nature Publishing, has won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for publishing innovation.
This international award is presented annually to products that display 'a significantly innovative approach to any aspect of publication', as judged by a panel of independent experts.
The award coincides with the release of the full version of Connotea.
"The web offers vast new opportunities for publishers to serve scientists and other scholars in ways that were unimaginable in the print-only world.
"Connotea is a good example of that.
"We have taken some of the latest technical and social trends on the web - notably social bookmarking and tagging - and applied them in a way that we hope scientists will find useful for managing and discovering information.
"We are delighted and honoured that this approach has been recognized by the ALPSP," said Timo Hannay, director of web publishing.
Connotea is a free online social bookmarking tool developed by NPG.
It allows users to store their web links online, enabling them to be accessed from any web browser, and to organise them using individually chosen tags.
The site also allows users to share their links with others and discover links to new publications or other resources relevant to their interests.
"The judges commented that the quality of all the finalists was especially good, but in the end they were unanimous in agreeing that Connotea had the edge, and it was duly and enthusiastically declared the winner for 2005," said the ALPSP.
Connotea, which went live in beta form in December 2004, is now being launched in its full form.
This follows a series of major upgrades to enhance its functionality.
Recent additions include DOI support, user groups and extended privacy options.
These new features mean, for example, that users can bookmark a paper by simply highlighting its DOI in their browser, or even by entering the DOI of a paper they are reading in print.
They can then choose to share this bookmark with everyone or privately within a group.
"The removal of the beta label from Connotea reflects the rich functionality and stability that it has achieved, but does not mean that development will slow.
"On the contrary, a long list of new features is in the pipeline, and as before we will be announcing each one on the Connotea site as it is released," said Ben Lund, new technology developer and leader of the Connotea project.
To coincide with this, NPG has released an updated version of Connotea Code, the source code behind Connotea, which now includes these latest features.
Connotea Code is freely available to use under an open source license and can be downloaded.
The site's usage has grown rapidly, with over 1.5 million page impressions in August 2005 and the September total already on track to exceed this by a large margin.
It currently hosts nearly 30,000 links annotated with almost 17,000 tags, including hot topics such as avian flu, open access, neglected diseases, and electronic laboratory notebooks.
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a division of Macmillan Publishers, dedicated to serving the academic, professional scientific and medical communities.
NPG's flagship title, Nature, is the world's most highly-cited weekly multidisciplinary journal and was first published in 1869.
Other publications and services include the Nature research journals, Nature Reviews, Nature Clinical Practice, a range of prestigious academic journals, including society-owned publications, news content and scientific career information from Naturejobs.
