Public accessibility

OpenTechnical publications are intended to be openly accessible to persons interested in their technical subject matter.

Independent discovery mechanisms

The service provides several discovery paths, each sufficient on its own:

• hierarchical technical categories, at /topics/;
• full-text search over the complete corpus, at /search;
• a publication-number index, at /publications/;
• a chronological archive, at /archive/;
• direct permanent URLs of the form /p/OT-YYYY-NNNNNNNNN;
• machine-readable XML sitemaps and feeds.

Our own index does not depend on anyone else's

External search-engine indexing cannot be guaranteed and is not relied upon. The site's own full-text index covers every publication from the moment it is published, whether or not any outside crawler has ever seen it. The taxonomy, the chronological archive and the number index are likewise complete.

No restrictions

No account, payment, registration or confidentiality agreement is required to access published disclosures. Publication pages are served without cookies and without JavaScript being required to read them. Ordinary publication pages are not rate limited.

Crawling

Publication pages, taxonomy pages, the archive and the number index are fully crawlable and are listed in the sitemaps. Search result pages and arbitrary filter combinations carry noindex,follow, because an unbounded crawlable filter space wastes crawler capacity that would otherwise be spent on the publications themselves.