opinion

The number of registered users of iMechanica exceeded 3000 today, three months after iMechanica welcomed its 2000th user.  The number of posts has exceeded 1700, and the number of comments, 3800. The growth of iMechanica has been stable and amazing, leading to a natural question: why do people register at iMechanica? iMechanica is open:  evevryone can read everything without registration.  You can post anything of interest to mechanicians once you register for a free account. 

The number of registered users of iMechanica is approaching 3000.  This sustained growth has been surprising to many, considering that iMechanica was launched less than a year ago, in September 2006, that iMechanica uses an off-the-shelf open-source software, Drupal, and that everyone can read everything without registration.  Why have so many people registered?  There might be many reasons, such as

Elsevier-bashing has become a sport among researchers.  The company is singled out, among publishers of research journals, perhaps because it is the largest.  We might as well use Elsevier as a representative of the publishers, and hard-working people at Elsevier should not be offended. 

On 6 June 2007, about 50 mechanicians attended a special session at the McMat 2007, "iMechanica.org get together". The attendees of this special session came from various job sectors, such as academia, industry as well as government agencies. The session was chaired by K. Ravi-Chander and Rui Huang, who also served in the organizing committee of McMat 2007.