President’s Column: Energizing Tomorrow: SPE’s Scholarly Publishing

SPE’s Mission is “to connect a global community of engineers, scientists, and related energy professionals to exchange knowledge, innovate, and advance their technical and professional competence regarding the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas and related energy resources to achieve a safe, secure, and sustainable energy future.” When I summarize this to explain to somebody that doesn’t know much about SPE, I usually say something along the lines of “SPE’s main goal is technology transfer.” SPE accomplishes this through a variety of routes including in-person events, webinars, online training, etc., but perhaps the most well-known and long-lasting impact SPE has in this space is through its scholarly publishing. SPE’s publishing history began long before SPE was a standalone entity. As many of you might know, SPE had its start as the Petroleum Division within the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) in 1922. In 1956, AIME changed its name to the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, and the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME was formed as a semiautonomous entity emerging from the AIME Petroleum Division in 1957. Eventually, SPE became a standalone, separately incorporated organization in 1985. In the early 1900s, as AIME incorporated petroleum into its technological areas, publications about petroleum soon followed. In fact, AIME publications focused on oil and natural gas and published under Transactions of the AIME include some of the most important and highly cited papers ever published in our industry including J.J. Arps’ “Analysis of Decline Curves” (1945), S.E. Buckley and M.C. Leverett’s “Mechanism of Fluid Displacement in Sands” (1942), and (my personal favorite) M.K. Hubbert’s and D.G. Willis’s “Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing” (1957). Building on the solid foundations laid by AIME and its Transactions of the AIME, SPE initiated the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT). Different from the flagship magazine JPT that we know now, the early magazine was a peer-reviewed, hard-copy journal that was one of the first and only major options to publish technological advances in the oil and natural gas industry. The early JPT eventually morphed into the Society of Petroleum Engineers Journal (SPE Journal) in 1961, which was then split into four discipline-specific journals in 1986. Over the past 4 decades since that initial journal split in 1986, the scholarly publication environment has changed rapidly and significantly, as has the breadth and interests of membership, and SPE has worked hard to keep up with the changing times. Additional peer-reviewed publication options were added, non-peer-reviewed publication options were initiated, magazines on various topics were added with some still published and others sunset, a book publishing business was started (more on that later), and the well-known OnePetro website was launched in 2007 with support from the SPE Foundation. However, as the saying goes, the only constant is change, and so it is with the world of scholarly publishing and SPE’s publishing position. We must keep up or become obsolete. With this context, the remainder of this column explores the challenges SPE faces in delivering high-quality publications, the external forces shaping this work, and what lies ahead.