Well, it’s been a year. And that’s about all we can say about 2020. Here at Engineering Archive, the growth of engineering preprint submissions has continued with 670 submissions on the year, bringing the server’s total hosted preprints to 1447, up from 777 at the same point in 2019.

In 2020, we have also seen a continuing trend of higher monthly submission rates, with December receiving the highest number of submissions of any month in our 4.5 year history!

Preprints hosted on engineering archive have now received more than 620,000 downloads, more than doubling the cumulative total downloads at the end of last year! This results in a lifetime savings of at least $15,500,000 for the engineering community if every one of those downloads represented the purchase of a PDF from a paywalled article.

As a grassroots organization, we continue to rely on the support of our community stakeholders for financial sustainability. We welcome and eagerly request your financial support through a donation to Open Engineering, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization for the promotion of open practices in engineering in all forms, which supports Engineering Archive. Donations are needed!

We also 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. We are especially grateful for those members who have already renewed their membership for a second year!

• University Libraries - University of Washington
• Princeton University Library
• Harvard Library
• Oregon State University Libraries

With the difficult financial situation that many institutions have found themselves in this year, we are in need of new institutional members to maintain support at the level needed for the annual operations of the server. Interested individuals can reach out to info@engrxiv.org to learn more.

Again, THANK YOU SO MUCH to those who have already joined us in creating a sustainable future for open access engineering scholarship and to those of you planning to lend your support soon!

Engineering Archive will be participating in the #Strike4BlackLives, Wednesday, June 10th, 2020. For the entirety of the day, in the Central US time zone, we will not be reviewing or posting new preprints to the server.

We hope that our users will use this day as an opportunity to reflect on the systemic issues in academia, research, and engineering which disproportionately impact our Black colleagues in negative ways. The organizers of the strike have done a great job of preparing a list of ideas for how we might all identify the ways in which we can help. If this is all new to you, you can start by doing the reading, take action to be actively anti-racist, and allowing space for healing.

As of yesterday, Engineering Archive surpassed 1000 hosted eprints on the server. Yay for celebrating arbitrary milestones! We are so grateful to the community for trusting the archive to host your work and for supporting community owned research infrastructure. While big publishers are jumping into the preprint game, we feel now it is more important than ever that researchers have outlets which are “not for profit, community-based, and publisher-neutral”. We may never be able to compete with the big publishers financially, but we operate with the communities best interests at heart and have no desire to lock our authors into any one publishing ecosystem.

The growth trajectory of the Engineering Archive continues its upward trend and so far, May 2020 has been are highest submission month to date.

At the same time, we’ve matched the total number of submissions in all of 2018 (230) just in year-to-date numbers for 2020. We expect that we will quickly surpass 2019’s number of submissions (411).

Once again, thank you to the engineering community for supporting Engineering Archive and we look forward to your continued support in the future!

If you’d like to see a snapshot of Engineering Archive’s first 1000 hosted eprints, we’ve made that available on Zenodo: