The year 2019 is drawing to a close and it has been a wonderful year for the Engineering Archive! This was another record breaking year in terms of submissions to the server. We ended the year at 411 submission in 2019, which (as it did last year) surpasses the total submission from 2016, 2017, and 2018 combined.

We’ve also seen a continuing trend from last year in that the submission rate has steadily increased as the year has progressed, showing promise for 2020.

Finally, preprints hosted on engineering archive recently surpassed 300,000 downloads (301,492 downloads at the time of writing to be exact)! We think that this shows the power of open access scholarship. If every one of those downloads represented the purchase of a PDF from a paywalled article, that would be a savings of at least $7,500,000 for the engineering community.

With this growth, Engineering Archive faces the ever present challenge of sustainability of the operation (we don’t intend to ever sell out to a private entity). With that in mind, we took two important steps financial sustainability this year.

1) We have formalized the relationship between the Engineering Archive and Open Engineering Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization for the promotion of open practices in engineering in all forms. Engineering Archive is a program of Open Engineering Inc. under which Open Engineering operates as the fundraising body to help meet the financial needs of the server, individual donations are welcome!

2) We launched 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. Since launching in September, 10 academic libraries (listed below) have signed up to pledge their support. We are so grateful for their early contributions which will help us meet our financial obligations for the coming year. We are still looking for additional members, so please reach out to your home institutions to discuss the Membership Circle with them and encourage them to join. Interested individuals can reach out to info@engrxiv.org to learn more.

The first 10 institutional members of the Engineering Archive Membership Circle:

• University Libraries - University of Washington
• Princeton University Library
• Harvard Library
• Arthur Lakes Library - Colorado School of Mines
• McGill Library
• University Library - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
• Oregon State University Libraries
• University of Texas Libraries
• MIT Libraries
• Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries - Vanderbilt University

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!

Update to our legal status

Engineering Archive started as and has remained a grassroots effort, by researchers, for researchers. As Engineering Archive has grown, it has become increasingly necessary to create an entity that is capable of managing its own finances and have its own legal status. Up to this point, Engineering Archive has been almost entirely financed by Director Devin Berg in addition to the in-kind contributions of the Center for Open Science.

With that in mind, Devin launched Open Engineering Inc. to search as an umbrella organization, and legal entity, over the top of Engineering Archive. Open Engineering is:

a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization for the promotion of open practices in the engineering field. We are working towards increased awareness of open practices as well as providing tools to better enable engineers to be more open. We also provide resources and trainings that allow engineers to develop open workflows and participate more fully in the open dissemination of engineering knowledge.

Under Open Engineering, we now have the ability to accept tax-deductible donations and use other forms of generating income such as Amazon Smile.

Introducing the Membership Circle

Financing a grassroots effort such as Engineering Archive has always been, and probably will always be, a challenge. To this end, Engineering Archive has launched a new funding mechanism called the Membership Circle for libraries and institutions interested in supporting open engineering scholarship. We hope that in the shifting landscape of academic publishing, academic libraries and institutions will be able to find room in their budgets to support open access efforts such as Engineering Archive. At risk of sounding self-serving, we feel that efforts such as Engineering Archive are critical for increasing the availability of research and knowledge to the general public, particularly when the generation of that knowledge is publicly funded. This is especially important in engineering, a field where when applied correctly can have significant positive societal impact.

Your help needed!

We hope that all our Engineering Archive advocates will consider supporting these efforts by either helping us with a direct donation to Open Engineering or by advocating at your own institutions for them to support Engineering Archive and open engineering scholarship by joining the Engineering Archive Membership Circle.

We are well into 2019 now and the rate of submission to Engineering Archive continues to increase (check out our stats!). With this increased submission rate, we have also seen an increase in spam. We try to catch these as quickly as possible and remove them, but using a post-moderation process means that the spam gets shared publicly on our social media accounts before being caught. Therefore, to help mitigate this, we will be shifting Engineering Archive to a pre-moderation process. This means that all submissions will be reviewed prior to being publicly shared. This will result in a small delay between submission and public availability/social media sharing, but we will work to keep this delay to a minimum.

At the same time, we are rolling out a new feature which will allow authors to request withdrawal of posted preprints. While we expect these requests to be rare, there are circumstances where it is appropriate to take down a preprint in order to comply with copyright policies and other requirements. When the request is made, authors will be asked to provide a reason for the withdrawal which will be reviewed by a moderator. Once the withdrawal is processed, the preprint file will be removed and it will be replaced with a page containing the title, authors, and reason provided for withdrawal. This page will serve as a landing page for any future visitors looking for the preprint.

More information about this and other Engineering Archive policies can be found on our guidelines page or our FAQ page. Happy preprinting!