We are pleased to announce that manchesterhive and manchesteropenhive have been shortlisted for the Best Publisher User Experience Award 2020, a new award hosted by Open Athens.
About the award
This new award for best publisher user experience puts the spotlight on those publishers that strive to put their users at the heart of their service design with the simple aim of giving users easy access to their content.
The award builds on Open Athens’ ongoing commitment to drive forward innovation in the information industry and to make access to knowledge as easy as possible for end users.
Our two sites, manchesterhive (paid for content)and manchesteropenhive (open access content) were carefully developed through engagement with many stakeholders, including librarians, readers, authors and editors.
Benefits to users are that all MUP content, books, journals and collections are hosted in a responsive and easy-to-use environment with a clean and contemporary design, with the added facility of being able to search across the two sites. We offer unrestricted simultaneous user access through IP authentication with remote access provided by Shibboleth and OpenAthens that is DRM free. COUNTER usage statistics are also available.
Benefits for our authors and editors include greater discoverability and accessibility for publications, greater promotion and visibility, and increased global readership.
What happens next and how you can take part
The next stage of the process is for Open Athens to assess user experience on our sites through a series of short 15 min telephone interviews with librarians and their library users.
1. Register your interest in taking part by Friday 22 November. Interviews will take place between 25 November – 6 December 2019.
2. Spread the word! Please encourage your library colleagues and library users to take part in this research.
And the winner is…
Finalists will be given an opportunity to showcase their work in a 10 minute case study presentation at a webinar on 20 February 2020. The winner will be announced at the Open Athens’ Access Lab 2020 conference in London on 19 March 2020.
Panel of judges
- Bernie Folan, scholarly communications consultant
- Helen Malone, director, Global Information Hub, GSK
- Andy Priestner, trainer and consultant, UXinLibraries
- Rich West, senior digital content and ux manager, Jisc
Jane Charlton, marketing manager at Open Athens, will chair the panel of judges.