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The DOI for Scholarly Publishing is the inaugural winner of the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact

The DOI for Scholarly Publishing is the inaugural winner of the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact

February 2025

NISO is pleased to join The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) in announcing the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact. Named in honor of Bruce Rosenblum, the award celebrates innovations that have transformed the scholarly publishing ecosystem, focusing on technologies, standards, or practices that have become indispensable to its operation, and its inaugural winner is the DOI for Scholarly Publishing. 

Bruce Rosenblum 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. He was a pivotal figure in the scholarly communications industry, renowned for his expertise in developing Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and championing XML standards. He served on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Board of Directors from 2005 to 2013 and played a critical role in the development of the JATS and STS standards. As a NISO board member, he tirelessly advocated for persistent identifiers, semantic tagging, high-quality metadata, and industry standards.

Over the past three decades, since its adoption by Crossref, the DOI for Scholarly Publishing has been 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. 

This initiative has taken 18 months of collaboration by its five sponsoring organizations within two committees. The Award Governance Committee is made up of the leaders of the five organizations: Caroline Sutton, CEO of STM; Melanie Dolechek, Executive Director of SSP; Peter Berkery, Executive Director of AUPresses; Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO; and Wayne Sime, CEO of ALPSP. Each body has two representatives forming the Award Planning and Piloting Committee, which currently includes Annette Windhorn and Charles Watkinson (AUPresses), Eefke Smit and IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg (STM), Lou Peck and Louise Russell (ALPSP), Mary Beth Barilla (replacing Nettie Lagace, no longer with NISO) and Todd Carpenter (NISO), and Simon Holt and Yael Fitzpatrick (SSP). Bill Kasdorf is the convenor and facilitator of both committees.

The Award Planning and Piloting Committee will develop an informative program about the DOI for Scholarly Publishing in 2025 and facilitate conversations about its history, impact, and potential. The Committee will go on to select and promote additional recipients each year.

For more information about the Rosenblum Award, visit the award website (www.rosenblumaward.org) or view the informational video.