IntechOpen

Our story

The company was founded in Vienna in 2004 by Alex Lazinica and Vedran Kordic, two PhD students researching robotics. While completing our PhDs, we found it difficult to access the research we needed. So, we decided to create a new Open Access publisher. A better one, where researchers like us could find the information they needed easily. The result is IntechOpen, an Open Access publisher that puts the academic needs of the researchers before the business interests of publishers.

We started by publishing journals and books from the fields of science we were most familiar with - AI, robotics, manufacturing and operations research. Through our growing network of institutions and authors, we soon expanded into related fields like environmental engineering, nanotechnology, computer science, renewable energy and electrical engineering, Today, we are the world’s largest Open Access publisher of scientific research, with over 4,200 books and 54,000 scientific works including peer-reviewed content from more than 116,000 scientists spanning 161 countries. Our authors range from globally-renowned Nobel Prize winners to up-and-coming researchers at the cutting edge of scientific discovery.

In the same year that IntechOpen was founded, we launched what was at the time the first ever Open Access, peer-reviewed journal in its field: the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (IJARS).

The IntechOpen timeline

2004

  • Intech Open is founded in Vienna, Austria, by Alex Lazinica and Vedran Kordic, two PhD students, and their first Open Access journals and books are published.
  • Alex and Vedran launch the first Open Access, peer-reviewed robotics journal and IntechOpen’s flagship publication, the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (IJARS).

2005

  • IntechOpen publishes its first Open Access book: Cutting Edge Robotics.

2006

  • IntechOpen publishes a special issue of IJARS, featuring contributions from NASA scientists regarding the Mars Exploration Rover missions.

2008

  • Downloads milestone: 200,000 downloads reached

2009

  • Publishing milestone: the first 100 Open Access STM books are published

2010

  • Downloads milestone: one million downloads reached
  • IntechOpen expands its book publishing into a new field: medicine.

2011

  • Publishing milestone: More than five million downloads reached
  • IntechOpen publishes 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harold W. Kroto’s “Strategies to Successfully Cross-Link Carbon Nanotubes”. Find it here.
  • IntechOpen and TBI collaborate on a project to explore the changing needs of researchers and the evolving ways that they discover, publish and exchange information. The result is the survey “Author Attitudes Towards Open Access Publishing: A Market Research Program”.
  • IntechOpen hosts SHOW - Share Open Access Worldwide; a series of lectures, debates, round-tables and events to bring people together in discussion of open source principles, intellectual property, content licensing innovations, remixed and shared culture and free knowledge.

2012

  • Publishing milestone: 10 million downloads reached
  • IntechOpen holds Interact2012, a free series of workshops held by figureheads of the scientific community including Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, who took the audience through some of the most impressive human-robot interactions observed in his lab.

2013

  • IntechOpen joins the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) as part of a commitment to guaranteeing the highest standards of publishing.

2014

  • IntechOpen turns 10, with more than 30 million downloads to date.
  • IntechOpen appoints its first Regional Representatives - members of the team situated around the world dedicated to increasing the visibility of our authors’ published work within their local scientific communities.

2015

  • Downloads milestone: More than 70 million downloads reached, more than doubling since the previous year.
  • Publishing milestone: IntechOpen publishes its 2,500th book and 40,000th Open Access chapter, reaching 20,000 citations in Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science.
  • 40 IntechOpen authors are included in the top one per cent of the world’s most-cited researchers.
  • Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Science Book Citation Index begins indexing IntechOpen’s books in its database.

2016

  • IntechOpen is identified as a world leader in Simba Information’s Open Access Book Publishing 2016-2020 report and forecast. IntechOpen came in as the world’s largest Open Access book publisher by title count.

2017

  • Downloads milestone: IntechOpen reaches more than 100 million downloads
  • Publishing milestone: IntechOpen publishes its 3,000th Open Access book, making it the largest Open Access book collection in the world