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.
Setting the Stage
So, first, what are the current SPE publication options? Likely most of you are familiar with some of SPE’s publishing portfolio, but perhaps not all. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, here is a quick synopsis.
- Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT): SPE’s online flagship magazine that includes features on technology advances and industry issues. The majority of these articles are written by full-time JPT staff; however, there is also the opportunity for contributed content. There is a JPT Editorial Review Board that selects papers from SPE events that are synopsized in JPT. JPT staff fact-check all articles that go into the magazine, but the articles are not peer‑reviewed.
- The Way Ahead (TWA): the SPE magazine “written by and for young professionals.” As the tagline implies, the articles for this online magazine are developed by young professionals (YPs) that are SPE members 35 years of age or younger. SPE staff liaise with the TWA Editorial Board, consisting of SPE YP volunteers, and oversee the website.
- SPE Journal (SPEJ): SPE’s peer-reviewed journal. The impact factor of SPEJ currently sits at 3.0 with a time-to-first decision of approximately 30 days. SPEJ takes direct submissions as well as submissions from manuscripts submitted to SPE in-person events [i.e., conferences].
- OnePetro: the website where all SPE papers and other published materials are housed and available for download. SPE partners with 22 other entities (listed here) on OnePetro providing access to over 1.3 million searchable documents. The publications on OnePetro are assigned DOI (digital object identifier) numbers which are unique to that publication. For the SPE papers listed on the site, if the DOI number ends in “PA,” that means the paper has been peer approved and is from a peer-reviewed journal. If the SPE paper’s DOI number ends in “MS,” that stands for manuscript and means that the paper was presented at an in-person event and is considered a proceedings paper, i.e., not peer reviewed.
- Technical Guidance Documents
- Petroleum Resources Management System (PRMS): describes the system developed by the SPE Oil and Gas Reserves Committee for consistent and reliable definition, classification, and estimation of hydrocarbon resources. Sponsored by six societies, including the World Petroleum Council, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Society of Petroleum Evaluation Engineers, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers, and the Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts.
- CO2 Storage Resources Management System (SRMS): describes the system developed by a subcommittee of the CCUS Technical Section to establish a technically based capacity and resources evaluation standard for CO2 storage.
- Technical Reports: address areas where SPE membership and the public would benefit from understanding current technology and challenges. These reports are proposed to the Board of Directors Technical Content Committee, who assigns a Technical Director to facilitate review and public comment ahead of publication. (If you’re interested in learning more about these Board entities, please see my 1 December 2025 President’s column.)
- SPE Books: books developed and published by SPE that are now available digitally on OnePetro and in print through PennWell Books.
These are the “written word” components of SPE’s publication portfolio. SPE also has a large digital library of resources, but for this article, I’m just focusing on the written options.
Impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
I don’t mean to sound overdramatic, but AI might be the most impactful thing to hit publishing since the mechanical printing press was invented. Whether you use it daily or have avoided it since it became mainstream with ChatGPT’s release in 2022, there is no arguing about the tremendous impact that it is having on scholarly publishing. I think I could write an entire column on my personal evolution with AI over the past 3 years as one who works in the academic world. However, for now I think it will suffice to say that generative AI is here to stay, and SPE must address how it approaches the subject.
As with any tool, AI can be very beneficial when used correctly, but also dangerous if abused. SPE has adopted a policy on AI-generated content in publications that reflects this fine line. In short, AI tools are allowed to help with English language, grammar, etc. to improve the overall quality of the paper, but their use does not extend to generating the substantive content of the publication. Additionally, whenever an AI language tool is used on a paper, this should be clearly disclosed in the methodology or acknowledgement section of the paper.
Use of such tools is not negative! SPE encourages their use in the correct manner to help improve the quality of our publications but also believes that a reader of any publication should know what is human-generated and what isn’t. To help with identification of AI-generated content, an SPE workgroup on paper quality is currently evaluating AI tools, much like the plagiarism-checker that is currently used on all SPE papers. This tool will be rolled out later in 2026 and used on all SPE manuscripts published in the OnePetro library.
Paper Quality Workgroup
Speaking of paper quality, a Board-level workgroup has been hard at work over the past year developing options that can improve the quality of SPE’s paper publications. Five recommendations have been implemented that will have a positive impact on upcoming publications, including:
- Abstracts selected for publication in a conference or symposium will not be placed/ranked in the technical program as a technical presentation or alternate until the full paper is submitted and reviewed. The intent of this approach is to incentivize authors to provide quality content in the full paper, and then to order the technical program based on the full paper, not abstract, quality.
- New training videos are being created that all committee members and authors will be required to watch before proceeding with involvement in an event. These videos will relay basic expectations and create a consistent message to all those involved.
- Minimum qualifications for committee members are being established for all events to help drive improved paper quality. These qualifications will help to clarify committee responsibilities and enhance accountability for all involved.
- Implement an AI pre-checker tool (as discussed above). SPE currently publishes approximately 5,500 conference papers per year, and the AI pre-check will help immediately identify papers that do not meet certain minimum quality criteria.
- Update the policy on AI-generated content in publications.
It will take time to implement these recommendations fully, but the overall outcome should absolutely improve overall paper quality.
Open Access Impacts
Over the past 20–25 years, open access (OA) publishing has had a large impact on scholarly publishing across all publishers, including SPE. OA practices allow publications to be delivered to readers free or at a reduced charge. The general push for OA arose due to a variety of reasons including the belief that many research publications are funded by government or university grants and should therefore be open to the general public. Eventually, some funding agencies and countries started requiring that any publications resulting from research be published in an OA format.
To a reader, OA sounds like a great option—why wouldn’t somebody like free access to a paper? However, let’s face it, nothing is ever free and that is the case in OA publications also. With the advent of the internet, anybody can basically publish anything online that they want. However, this comes with the warning of “buyer beware!” If somebody wants to publish a paper through a society like SPE, complete with SPE’s stamp of approval, there are still costs involved in doing so. It takes significant staff time to maintain the quality standards such as those implemented by the workgroup mentioned above. SPE staff administer and guide the committees of the numerous SPE conferences, run the plagiarism and AI checks and communicate with authors who may be in violation, implement the formatting and uploading of the 5,500 annual SPE papers into OnePetro, and perform other related tasks. And then there is the cost of maintaining OnePetro in general.
If you believe that SPE papers or standards should be completely free to members, I’d encourage you to think—truly think—about all the background work and associated costs that go into maintaining SPE’s publications. Those costs would need to be recouped somewhere, including what would likely be a significant increase in membership and/or conference attendance fees. An even more radical alternative is that SPE could eliminate its publishing branch entirely and allow everyone to publish their papers online in a blog format or with another publisher, but I don’t think that’s truly what any of us want to see happen. Again, quality and consistency come with a price.
None of the above diminishes in any way the tremendous time and effort put in by the numerous authors and volunteers that write and review the papers that appear in OnePetro and SPEJ. Their efforts are critical to maintaining the quality of the works published by SPE. But it takes both volunteers and staff to run the machine that is SPE publishing and to continue to deliver and make accessible the technology transfer that SPE is known for in this area.
As with many publishers, SPE has adopted a hybrid approach to OA publishing, which allows authors to publish in an OA format while offsetting the costs mentioned above. SPE’s OA policy is outlined here. Authors can pay a publication charge of USD 2,500 for SPEJ and USD 600 for conference papers (modified for SPE members and various income economies) to allow their publication to be published as OA access on OnePetro. If that cost seems substantial to you, it’s not and is quite in line with typical OA publishing standards. In OnePetro, OA papers are identified by the orange, open-lock access logo, originating from the Public Library of Science, and OnePetro can be searched for these papers. Next time you meet an author of an OA publication, a thank you for covering the associated costs may be appropriate.
Current Peer-Reviewed Status and Impact Factor
As mentioned above, SPEJ is SPE’s peer-reviewed journal. Many of you might know that in January 2024 the various topical SPE peer-reviewed journals such as Drilling & Completions Journal, Production & Operations Journal, etc., were combined into a single journal, i.e., SPEJ. This was done mainly to centralize the peer-review process under a single editorial board to improve consistency in the process. Additionally, with the cessation of print journal editions and fully online publishing, individual journals were no longer necessary. A final reason was to improve the impact factor (IF) of SPE peer‑reviewed journal publications. If you aren’t familiar with IFs, they are a rating of a journal’s influence based on calculations of how often articles are cited. This might not be important to some authors, but they are critical to our academic members as IFs weigh heavily in consideration of most promotion and tenure processes.
If you are wondering how the consolidation of the SPE journals is progressing, Table 1 shows recent IFs. Table 2 shows submissions by topic both “estimated” for 2024 based on averages from previous journal submissions from 2022 and 2023 for the standalone journals such as Drilling & Completions Journal, Production & Operations Journal, etc., compared to the “actual” submissions by topic to SPEJ for 2024 and 2025. Table 2 demonstrates how the consolidation initially impacted overall topics and continues to do so with a 14% overall increase in submissions in 2025 compared with 2024. Paper acceptances follow similar trends. The decrease in reservoir engineering submissions is interesting; however, this declining trend was observed before the consolidation of the journals, so the decrease may simply be a continuation of that pattern.
For reference, the current SPEJ Editorial Board is listed here. If you are interested in volunteering for the editorial board or learning more about the peer-review process, check out the Peer Review FAQs listed here.
Current Status of ELLM
As some of you might know, SPE has launched an energy-focused large language model, called EnRG-LLM, developed by i2k Connect, fine-tuned on SPE’s extensive library in OnePetro, and financed by Aramco Americas. The EnRG-LLM is now available for companies to license for internal use. Contact service@onepetro.org if interested. With revenue from licenses, SPE plans to roll out a chatbot to members in the near future.
What About the Books?
The last topic I want to address in this column is SPE’s book collection. Unfortunately, SPE had to eliminate its book publishing branch in 2021 due to increasing publication costs and expanded competition. However, if you are looking for a title, SPE books are still available digitally on OnePetro and in print via PennWell Books.
Final Thoughts
Ideally this column has provided insight into SPE’s scholarly publishing processes along with the “why” for many of the Society’s decisions in this space, the historical context, and where we are headed in the future. Many of these topics could have been columns in their own right, but my intent was to provide the basics (without completely boring you if you even made it this far). If you want more information on any of these topics or want to discuss them further, please reach out to me via President@spe.org.
