Association for Academic Surgery (AAS)

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Elsevier Announces the Winner of the Surgical Specialties Innovation Challenge

In the recently completed Surgical Specialties Innovation Challenge, Elsevier invited members of the surgical community to help shape the future of online surgery publishing. With over 130 submissions, the interest in the challenge exceeded all expectations.

A three member committee reviewed the submissions and selected ‘Markup Carry-over’, submitted by Dr. Jesse Skoch MD of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, as the winner of the $5,000 (USD) prize.

In his submission, Dr. Skoch proposes to enable users to make notes (highlight, comment, etc.) in online articles that can be carried over to PDF versions of the articles.

“With so many outstanding proposals featuring innovative ideas aimed at improving scientific publishing, it was extremely challenging to select an overall winner. The winning proposal, Markup Carry-Over, addresses a very important limitation of the HTML versions of articles: the inability to mark the article with highlighting, underlining, and comments, and then save the marked-up version for future reference. I am certain that the proposed innovation would lead to wider adoption of online HTML articles among surgeons and others in the scientific community” said Dr. Scott LeMaire, Professor of Surgery and of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Vice Chair for Research in the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery, Director of Research in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, past-president of the Association for Academic Surgery and current co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Surgical Research.

Andrew Berin (Elsevier’s Publishing Director in the Health & Medical Sciences) said “We are very pleased with the quality and number of submissions.  The surgical community really stepped up to share with us their ideas on innovating around the published research paper.”

The number and quality of the submissions demonstrates the keen interest that readers and authors have in continuous innovation in online Medical publishing.

Congratulations to Dr. Skoch; and to all participants, a big thank you!

AAS Webmaster

Webmaster at Association for Academic Surgery
The Association for Academic Surgery was founded in 1967 and has grown significantly over the years being widely recognized as an inclusive surgical organization with over 2,500 member surgeons. Active members have traditionally held faculty appointments at a recognized academic center. Active membership is also available to senior/chief residents and fellows in approved training programs in general surgery and the surgical specialties. The impetus of the membership remains research-based academic surgery.