About OpenTechnical

Human knowledge and inventiveness are effectively endless. The ways of getting a piece of it onto the permanent record are not.

A patent costs thousands, takes years, and is worth doing only when somebody intends to enforce it. A peer-reviewed paper wants a study, a format, a reviewer and a wait. Both are good institutions and neither is built for the ordinary case: an engineer who has worked something out, knows it is useful, has no intention of monopolising it, and would simply like it to exist somewhere permanent instead of dying in a notebook.

So most of it is lost. Not the famous inventions, the small ones: a better way to seat a bearing, a fixture that stops a part being fitted backwards, a control sequence that removes a failure mode, a mechanism somebody designed carefully and will never build. Individually small, collectively enormous, and almost entirely unrecorded.

What this is

OpenTechnical.org is a non-profit open publication library. It exists so that anyone can put a technical idea on the record, free, permanently, and in a form that can be found, cited and checked years later.

It costs nothing to read and nothing to publish. There is no account, no paywall, no confidentiality agreement and no editorial gatekeeper deciding whether your contribution is important enough. If it is a genuine technical disclosure, it belongs here.

What you can publish

• A description of how something works, or how to make it work better.
• Drawings, with or without much text around them.
• A method, a mechanism, a circuit, a layout, a control scheme.
• An idea you have decided not to pursue, so that somebody else can.
• A correction or an extension to something already published here.

A title and an abstract are the only things every publication needs. Beyond those, publish as much or as little structure as the idea actually has. Start here.

Why it is built the way it is

Putting something on the record is only worth anything if the record holds. So the engineering here serves three things, in this order: that a publication can be found, that it can be shown to be the same document it was on the day it appeared, and that the day it appeared can be established without taking our word for it.

Publications are static files. They are written once, hashed, listed in a signed manifest, and served directly without the application server or the database in the path. A failure in the search engine, the database or the administrative system cannot make a published document disappear, because none of them is involved in serving it.

Discovery deliberately has four independent routes: the subject taxonomy, full-text search, the date archive and the publication number index. Any one of them is enough to find a document, so a classification mistake or a search outage does not hide anything.

And every publication carries evidence: content hashes, a signature, an independent timestamp from an outside authority, and retrieval records made by machines that are not ours. You do not have to trust us about any of it. Here is how to check it yourself.

What is also here

Alongside original disclosures, the library holds records of technical documents published elsewhere, kept for reference and clearly marked as such. A record of that kind says plainly who published it first and when, and links to the original. OpenTechnical does not claim to have disclosed it.

What publishing here does not do

It does not grant you a patent, and it does not stop anyone else using what you publish. Publishing a disclosure openly is close to the opposite of claiming a monopoly on it: it puts the idea into the public domain of technical knowledge, where it is available to everyone and where its existence and date are on record. Some people publish for exactly that reason. See the publication policy for what we do and do not assert.

Operator

OpenTechnical.org is operated on a non-profit basis by Nebula Innovations Limited. Correspondence: contact@opentechnical.org.