Help Support Open Engineering Scholarship on engrXiv

engrXiv is seeking volunteer moderators to help maintain the quality, relevance, and integrity of submissions to our preprint server. Moderators play an important role in ensuring that manuscripts align with engrXiv’s mission, scope, and submission guidelines while supporting a welcoming and accessible platform for the engineering research community.

This is a volunteer service position and provides an opportunity to contribute to open scholarly communication, engage with emerging research across engineering disciplines, and support researchers worldwide.

Role Description

Volunteer moderators review newly submitted preprints before they are posted publicly on the server. Reviews focus on compliance with engrXiv policies and moderation guidelines rather than on scientific merit or peer review.

Moderators are expected to:

• Review submitted manuscripts against engrXiv’s moderation and content policies.
• Verify that submissions fall within the scope of engineering and related fields supported by the server.
• Check for compliance with basic submission requirements and community standards.
• Identify submissions that may require further review or escalation.
• Communicate respectfully and professionally with fellow moderators and administrators when questions arise.

Minimum Qualifications

Applicants should possess:

• A bachelor’s degree in engineering or a closely related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Familiarity with scholarly publishing, preprints, or academic research.
• Ability to evaluate whether a manuscript aligns with stated submission guidelines.
• Strong attention to detail and good judgment.
• Commitment to fair, consistent, and unbiased review practices.
• Ability to communicate professionally in written English.

Preferred Qualifications

Preference may be given to applicants with:

• A graduate degree in engineering or a related discipline.
• Experience as a researcher, author, reviewer, editor, or conference organizer.
• Prior involvement with open-access publishing, repositories, or preprint servers.
• Knowledge of research integrity, publication ethics, or scholarly communication practices.
• Experience working in multidisciplinary engineering fields.
• Interest in supporting open science and open engineering initiatives.
• Weekly availability.

Time Commitment

Moderation workload varies throughout the year. Most moderators review submissions on a flexible schedule and contribute as their availability permits. Preference for the ability to provide some volunteer time each week.

How to Volunteer

Individuals interested in serving as a volunteer moderator are encouraged to submit a brief statement of interest describing their background, areas of expertise, and relevant experience, along with their CV by email to volunteer [at] engrxiv.org.

Join us in supporting open, accessible, and community-driven engineering scholarship through engrXiv.

This year we have seen a much higher rate of submissions to the server. The number of posted preprints in 2025 increased to nearly 1200, up from about 640 in 2024.

This increase in preprint submissions seems to be due to a couple of factors, increased visibility of the server and a dramatic increase in generative AI-based spam. Somewhere around mid-2025, generative AI tools reached that sweet spot where they could produce technically coherent engineering content. Not necessarily good but coherent enough to pass a casual glance. Suddenly, we were inundated with papers that sounded plausibly technical but contained the academic equivalent of those AI-generated images where people have six fingers on each hand. This has resulted in roughly half of submissions being declined as the moderation team has had to become more aggressive in our evaluation of submitted works. We will be looking to expand our volunteer moderation team in 2026 and also looking to develop tools to assist with handling the increased workflow.

We continue to depend on the Engineering Archive Membership Circle for financial sustainability. Your $500 annual contributions from institutions, libraries, and organizations keep our servers running and our small team operational. Many of our supporting libraries are now in their 8th year of backing the platform, thank you for your continued commitment to open engineering knowledge!

We hope you’ll keep in touch via social media. Find us on the fediverse at our Mastodon account @engrxiv@scicomm.xyz.

Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

In the last few months, the problems associated with the explanded use of GPTs and LLMs via services such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and others have come to preprint servers in mass. At Engineering Archive, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in preprints submitted, growing from an average of 60 submissions per month to closer to 200. This increase is submissions has massively increase the moderation workload as it can be difficult to filter the real human-authored work, from the slop. Often these submissions are made by so-called “independent researchers” with no institutional affiliation. They may or may not be real people. In the past, submission spam was often used as a form of citation gaming, attempts to artificially exploit Google Scholar indexing to make ones academic profile look more prestigious than is deserved. However, more recently, this is no longer the case.

As reported in Nature, this wave of AI slop is not limited to engrXiv and is hitting other preprint servers in the same way, overwhelming our volunteer moderators. Unfortunately, this wave of AI slop has real costs associated with it in terms of volunteer burnout and the costs associated with hosting this content and issuing DOIs when it slips through moderation.

At Engineering Archive, we are going to attempt to further crack down on these types of submissions. Submissions that appear as though they may be largely AI generated are going to face further scrutiny. This will slow down the timeline from submission to public posting and unfortunately, some legitimate work will be caught up as well. “Independent researchers” may also be asked to further verify their identity. We are relunctant to restrict the publication of work from authors who currently lack institutional affiliation because we don’t believe that good engineering research can only be performed within academic facilities, but something must be done mitigate the negative impacts of LLM generated content.