We ended 2017 with 136 articles posted on engrXiv. At the time of writing, engrXiv is hosting 172 articles with more being uploaded all the time. While the rate of posting hasn’t yet increased exponentially, 2018 is definitely off to a great start!

Data: https://osf.io/e2hyd/ | Code: https://git.io/vx3TN

2017 has been a great year here at engrXiv. After a soft launch in mid-2016, the service rolled out in full in December 2016. At time of writing, we have published 136 engineering articles that are free to read and download. Over the last year we have also implemented a number of new features including being indexed by Google Scholar and the issuing of DOIs for all engrXiv submissions. There is more to come in 2018! Coming shortly, be on the lookout for enhancements to article level analytics and metadata options. A little further down the road we are looking to implement a commenting system.

It is becoming increasingly common that publishers are open to the posting of preprints prior to publication and often there are provisions for posting the author version of a manuscript after publication as well. While some publisher’s policies could use greater clarity, we expect to see greater improvement in this area through 2018 as authors push for more control over their scholarship and retention of more of their rights.

Currently only ~17% of published work in engineering is openly accessible. With your help, let’s make 2018 the year that open scholarship in engineering really takes off!

Far too often we see conferences host their proceedings on the temporary conference website, on Google Drive or Dropbox, or even just on flashdrives distributed to attendees. Of course, none of these options guarantee any form of permanence or wider distribution beyond the conference itself. Here is where engrXiv and OSF for Meetings can help. OSF for Meetings provides a centralized page (see below) for all associated articles that will allow conference participants to easily find the entire conference proceedings in one location. Meanwhile, by simultaneously posting each article from the proceedings to engrXiv, they become more visible to the wider engineering community, are automatically assigned a DOI, get indexed in Google Scholar, and can be easily connected to any later version of the article and continue to accumulate citations.

If you are interested in hosting your conference proceedings on OSF for Meetings and engrXiv, send us an email at info@engrxiv.org.