This year we have continued operation of Engineering Archive, our primarily organizational project. The archive has continued to see growth in usage across all metric in 2020 as compared with previous years. The rate of adoption of preprinting in engineering only seems to continue growing over time! In addition, we have started to build a listing of open-source engineering software as a means of shedding light on these projects and helping the community to better understand the available resources. Alongside that effort, we were able to help the authors of CADjs open-source and archive their source code. CADjs (source archived here) is a Javascript-based CAD programming environment, inspired by OpenSCAD, which was originally developed Dr. Krishnan Suresh’s Engineering Representations and Simulation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A look at 2020’s finances
This year has been difficult for many and the same is true for non-profits where funding has become more difficult to find. At Open Engineering, our primary source of income is the Engineering Archive Membership Circle which directly supports the operation of the preprint server itself. We’ve heard from some institutions that this year has caused their budgets to get tighter, particularly in the libraries, as universities face shrinking enrollments and the challenges of a global pandemic. This is why we are more grateful than ever for our supporters as discussed over on the Engineering Archive blog.
With that said, Open Engineering is currently in a stable position to start the new year. We have raised approximately 65% of our expected expenses for 2021 and we hope that over the next couple of months we will get close meeting our financial commitments for the year.
In 2020, Open Engineering had income of $2542.82, the majority coming from membership fees and a small portion from individual donations and interest credits. We had expenses of $4069.47, which includes service fees paid to the Center for Open Science, credit card processing fees, domain registration fees, and paperwork filing fees. The difference being funded by balances carried over from 2019.
Looking ahead
Our fee paid to COS will remain $3999 for 2021 based on our submission numbers which remained, just barely, under 500 for the June to July time-frame that they track. We expect that despite the difficulties in raising funds, we will be stable through 2021. Unfortunately, based on our growth, we expect our fee to be increased to $6999 for 2022 based on the COS fee schedule. With current levels of support through the membership circle, we will be unable to raise sufficient funds to cover this increased fee. This situation will require careful monitoring and consideration, to see if the community can continue to support a preprint server in engineering. Other alternatives include possibly moving to a self-hosted option, but this also would require community support as well as a dedicated partner to provide technical expertise. Ultimately, we are reliant on our institutional and community supporters to sustain our operations, and we need the community’s support now more than ever before! We would love to have your feedback and ideas in the comments.
Posted: January 8, 2024 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
2023 wrap-up
At Engineering Archive, 2023 was quite stable. Preprint submissions were slightly up from 2022 and the authoring workflow was smoothed out a bit thanks to the Open Engineering supported development of the authorVersion plugin for Open Preprint Systems.
Financial Update
Membership in the Engineering Archive Membership Circle has been mostly steady, but we did lose one membership institution in 2023. However, the continued support of our other members has made finances stable and we are able to meet out expenses while slowly building a small buffer in reserves to be able to plan for things like feature development and future increases in expenses.
Posted: September 21, 2023 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
Improving the submission editing workflow in OPS
Open Preprint Systems has had a community developed plugin for preprint versioning, called authorVersion, for a while, authored and supported by Lepidus Technologia. However, the plugin enabled authors to create new versions of their preprints only. It did not enable them to submit this new version to the server administrators for posting. This workflow was challenging, because server administrators had no way of knowing when a new version was ready to be published.
We are happy to have been able to contract with Lepidus Technologia to solve this issue by supporting the addition of greater functionality to this plugin. Preprint authors can now provide a justification for the creation of their new preprint version and submit it for review by server administrators. This version justification is also shown publicly on the preprint page to provide context to readers for the preprint revisions.
Open Engineering is glad to be able to give back to the preprint publishing community by enabling these developments and improvements in preprint software. It is only possible through the generous support of our donors and members of the Engineering Archive Membership Circle.
Posted: December 31, 2022 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
2022 wrap-up
The big news for 2022 was that we transitioned Engineering Archive from being hosted on the Open Science Framework to being hosted on Open Preprint Systems, a product of the Public Knowledge Project. We did see some decline in the number of preprints coming in this year, but overall the transition has been smooth and the new platform is operating as hoped.
Financial update
Income for the year totaled $7173.97, primarily from the Engineering Membership Circle. We had $8737.97 in expenses, drawing down some of our excess revenue from last year. These expenses covered our transition to the new hosting platform, hosting fees, and feature development at OPS, bringing RSS feeds to our preprint hosting software. Once again, org finances are in good shape this year thanks to our Engineering Membership Circle members and individual donors. Thank you!
Posted: September 30, 2022 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
Supporting the addition of RSS to OPS
After the migration of Engineering Archive from OSF to OPS, one item that was lost in the process was the RSS feeds for new preprints posted on the server. At OSF, these feeds had been developed as a side project, which were then used by many of their hosted servers.
While RSS feeds already exist for OPS’s older sibling, OJS, the same Web Feed plugin was not available for preprint servers running OPS. That is no longer the case! We have been able to support the translation of the Web Feeds plugin to be compatible with OPS via a sponsored development in partnership with PKP. Visitors to engrXiv will now see RSS links on the right-hand side allowing them to subscribe and get notifications of new preprints. These feeds also power Engineering Archive’s various social media posts. The new RSS feed functionality should be coming to OPS and available to all OPS users shortly.
We are happy that Open Engineering is able to contribute back to Open Preprint Systems in a way that will benefit all servers using the software.
Posted: January 1, 2022 by Open Engineering 1 Comment
2021 year-end update
This past year has been a relatively quiet one for Open Engineering. Operations have continued for the organization and Engineering Archive is existing as usual. The Journal of Open Engineering has published one additional article entitled, “New Calculator Design for Efficient Interface based on the Circular Group Approach” with one more currently under review.
Review of 2021 finances
Our organizational finances are in good shape at the moment, we received $10,000 from the Engineering Archive Membership Circle, which is artificially high compared with last year as the institutions which were late on payments last year got caught up in the first couple of months of 2021. Additionally we saw $250.33 in revenue from various donations and fundraisers. With this, we covered $4316.49 in expenses, primarily platform fees, domain registrations, and credit card processing fees. Having a little bit of excess revenue will allow us to begin planning for server improvements and development as we look forward to 2022.
Last Updated: December 30, 2020 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
Wrapping up 2020
This year we have continued operation of Engineering Archive, our primarily organizational project. The archive has continued to see growth in usage across all metric in 2020 as compared with previous years. The rate of adoption of preprinting in engineering only seems to continue growing over time! In addition, we have started to build a listing of open-source engineering software as a means of shedding light on these projects and helping the community to better understand the available resources. Alongside that effort, we were able to help the authors of CADjs open-source and archive their source code. CADjs (source archived here) is a Javascript-based CAD programming environment, inspired by OpenSCAD, which was originally developed Dr. Krishnan Suresh’s Engineering Representations and Simulation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A look at 2020’s finances
This year has been difficult for many and the same is true for non-profits where funding has become more difficult to find. At Open Engineering, our primary source of income is the Engineering Archive Membership Circle which directly supports the operation of the preprint server itself. We’ve heard from some institutions that this year has caused their budgets to get tighter, particularly in the libraries, as universities face shrinking enrollments and the challenges of a global pandemic. This is why we are more grateful than ever for our supporters as discussed over on the Engineering Archive blog.
With that said, Open Engineering is currently in a stable position to start the new year. We have raised approximately 65% of our expected expenses for 2021 and we hope that over the next couple of months we will get close meeting our financial commitments for the year.
In 2020, Open Engineering had income of $2542.82, the majority coming from membership fees and a small portion from individual donations and interest credits. We had expenses of $4069.47, which includes service fees paid to the Center for Open Science, credit card processing fees, domain registration fees, and paperwork filing fees. The difference being funded by balances carried over from 2019.
Looking ahead
Our fee paid to COS will remain $3999 for 2021 based on our submission numbers which remained, just barely, under 500 for the June to July time-frame that they track. We expect that despite the difficulties in raising funds, we will be stable through 2021. Unfortunately, based on our growth, we expect our fee to be increased to $6999 for 2022 based on the COS fee schedule. With current levels of support through the membership circle, we will be unable to raise sufficient funds to cover this increased fee. This situation will require careful monitoring and consideration, to see if the community can continue to support a preprint server in engineering. Other alternatives include possibly moving to a self-hosted option, but this also would require community support as well as a dedicated partner to provide technical expertise. Ultimately, we are reliant on our institutional and community supporters to sustain our operations, and we need the community’s support now more than ever before! We would love to have your feedback and ideas in the comments.
Posted: February 3, 2020 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
Partnering in the Community of Open Scholarship Grassroots Networks (COSGN)
Open Engineering has signed on to a collaborative effort being spearheaded by the Center for Open Science to develop a “network of networks” with a proposal submitted to the NSF 19-501 AccelNet program. If funded, we will be one of 120 partnering networks/organizations. From the proposal:
If successful, this collaborative effort will be open to additional open science organizations who are interesting in joining.
Posted: December 31, 2019 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
End of the year 2019
While Open Engineering Inc. has existed since 2016, it wasn’t until this year that the organization became officially recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and ramped up our fundraising efforts. This action was largely driven by the growth of the Engineering Archive and the need to meet the growing financial requirements of operating such a preprint server.
Our primary effort towards financial sustainability for the Engineering Archive was the creation 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. Since launching in September, 10 academic libraries have signed up to pledge their support.
More detail on the status of the Engineering Archive can be found on the year-end wrap-up post over at the engrXiv blog.
We are continuing to work through the development of The Journal of Open Engineering, where there are currently four articles submitted and available for peer-review. With new updates to the PubPub platform planned for 2020, we hope that the peer-review workflow will become more streamlined and friendly for authors and reviews alike.
With that, we wish a Happy New Year to all and hope that you will join us in our efforts to create greater, more equitable access to engineering scholarship in 2020.
Last Updated: November 16, 2019 by Open Engineering Leave a Comment
Driven by access: opening up the world of engineering research
Access to our shared human knowledge is a basic human right. This is particularly true when public finding is used to generate that knowledge. However, for engineering scholarship, the results of engineering research are largely not publicly accessible (Piwowar et al., 2018). This may be due to a lacking culture of preprinting or open access in most engineering disciplines, or to a lack of support from traditional society and commercial engineering publishers.
The case for open access in engineering is particularly strong from both a societal and a social justice point of view (Fleischfresser, Niemeyer, & Berg, 2016). In particular, lack of access to engineering knowledge can further disadvantage those living precariously with limited access to education and insufficient resources with with to purchase access to engineering expertise (D. Berg, 2017).
This is where we see opportunity, in the expansion of the impact that engineering scholarship can have on the world. As engineering researchers, it is our obligation to support such efforts. We can push our institutions to further these efforts as well by, for example, incentivizing impact over commercialization (D. R. Berg & Niemeyer, 2018).
We hope that you agree with this vision and will help Open Engineering while we continue to push for “access for all” for engineering scholarship.
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About This Site
Open Engineering is driving innovation through the development and administration of the Engineering Archive and The Journal of Open Engineering.