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.

This year has been a year of growth at Engineering Archive. We have seen a return to the annual submission numbers that we saw prior to the transition to the new hosting platform and greater than a 20% increase over last year! Some of the issues we saw last year with excessive spam submissions have been mitigated with the implementation of new software to catch automated submissions. Of course, that doesn’t stop those who make such submissions manually, but this is where our manual screening process comes in.

We continue to appreciate the support of the Engineering Archive Membership Circle. The Membership Circle creates the opportunity for institutions, libraries, and other organizations to support the sustainability of the server through a $500 annual contribution. Many of our supporting libraries are in their 7th year of keeping the server running!

We hope you’ll keep in touch via social media. Find us on the fediverse at our Mastodon account @engrxiv@scicomm.xyz. Note that we are winding down our usage of Twitter and will shortly stop using that platform altogether.

Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR!