Expanding the Reach of VFS Publications: Celebrating Our Community and Growing Our Impact
By Angelo Collins
VFS Executive Director
From Vertiflite, May/June 2025
At the Vertical Flight Society, we take great pride in advancing the state of the art in vertical flight, not only through our events and advocacy but also through the technical excellence of our members. Each year, hundreds of researchers and engineers contribute their work to our Journal of the American Helicopter Society and our Forum proceedings, capturing the innovation that powers our industry. But to ensure this great work receives the visibility and recognition it deserves, we must continuously evolve how we share it.
Currently, the Journal is hosted on Ingenta and is accessible to members through our website (www.vtol.org/my-VFS). Access is granted through member login or IP authentication for corporate members or institutions with a site license, such as university libraries. While this system provides a measure of security, it has often proven cumbersome for users — a frustration we’ve heard loud and clear.
For Forum papers and presentations, our online Vertical Flight Library (www.vtol.org/library) is the central access point. While included in most corporate membership offerings, users must still go through a checkout process for each item. This friction, coupled with concerns from authors and institutions about our reach relative to other publishers, signals the need for modernization.
We have taken important steps to address this. Following Forum 81, we will launch a brand-new VFS website featuring a fully integrated digital library. This platform will allow users to easily search, access and download Journal articles, proceedings, and technical presentations — all in one place. On a broader distribution front, we are pursuing a two-pronged strategy to expand accessibility and generate new revenue to support our mission:
- First, we are working with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) to host the Journal of the American Helicopter Society on their Aerospace Research Central (ARC). This will enable libraries and organizations to subscribe directly through a trusted academic publishing platform, significantly expanding our reach to their incumbent institutional and researcher subscriber base around the world — over 600 organizations strong.
- Second, we are in active discussions with SAE International to not only establish a reciprocal membership agreement, but to license our proceedings, Forum papers and technical presentations on the SAE Mobilus platform. This would allow for broader institutional access, library subscriptions and individual purchases, which would dramatically increase discoverability.
These partnerships will also help ensure that our publications receive full indexing through Google Scholar, including retroactive indexing of earlier works. That means more citations, more visibility and more impact for our members’ contributions.
With this positive momentum, we are planning to expand the Journal to six issues per year and aim to exceed 300 technical papers annually at our Forum. These steps will make VFS a more powerful platform for authors, researchers, and engineers and a more valuable resource for our members.
We look forward to sharing more details at Forum 81 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and we hope to see you there!
This commentary is also available as a pdf.
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Posted: 2025-04-23