Why Contribute to Technica Curiosa?

As a scientist or engineer, it is likely that you are painfully aware of the poor options available to you for disseminating your work in popular long-form media. That’s a problem we are here to solve with a unique editorial model that enables technical concepts to be communicated at multiple levels for multiple audiences.

The difficulty in breaking through to wider audiences is due, at least in part, to the fact that periodicals tend to be classified as either popular, trade, or academic (scholarly research journals), thus constraining audiences accordingly. It doesn’t have to be that way. Our approach to editorial is very different in that content is created to cross over and between those categories, increasing both the reach and the influence of our contributors’ works.

We accomplish this in a seamless way, traversing the serious hobbyist/inventor to technical professionals to the business people who are ushering new technologies into the marketplace. This latter point is particularly important. In fact, as much as the public needs science and technology, science and technology needs the public. And this is precisely why scholarly journals like Nature ask their contributors to make a case for publication not only on scientific grounds, but whether it would attract a “popular audience.”

Unfortunately, though, popular media consistently falls short. Consequently, readers are left with two choices: 1) content that overwhelms with technical detail (journal articles), or 2) content that delivers only half way, leaving readers wanting, stranded, or just dead-ended (essentially all other popular media). This is the next problem we are here to solve.

At Technica Curiosa, our long-form content (1,000 to 3,000 words or more) takes readers as deep as they want to go. Take, for example, a story in one of our titles, Popular Astronomy, about the detection of mysterious radio bursts (an example of our approach to popularizing a scholarly paper). The article demonstrates how content can seamlessly traverse historical perspectives to basic principles to underlying technologies, tapping every opportunity to cross-pollinate the big ideas across our other titles. As such, this same story will connect directly to a companion story (by a different author) in Mechanix Illustrated on building an interferometer—a basis of radio astronomy—while a cross-linked article in Popular Electronics will go into greater depth on designing and building circuitry for capturing such intergalactic phenomena.

That’s a real force multiplier in publicizing your products, technologies, solutions, and research—to say nothing of increasing your impact scores and altmetrics (if your contribution is derived from a scholarly article published in one of the journals, we provide a direct link to it)! And in the process, through this unique editorial model, we consistently:

  • Present the most relevant, reliable, timely, and valuable content created to inform, enlighten, inspire, and advance practical knowledge.
  • Highlight innovative applications of new technologies.
  • Bridge cross-discipline fields, developments, research, and educational programs to foster whole new classes of innovations.
  • Address all readership personas from the tech curious/maker to the professional engineer/technologist.
  • Infuse science and technology into the popular culture and consciousness.
  • Popularize the big ideas that are essential to inspiring new generations of technologists.
  • Facilitate and promote technology transfer opportunities.

And with every story linked to dedicated discussion forums, we enable unprecedented levels of inspiring and productive engagement.

Moreover, because we cross-pollinate content across multiple disciplines, we can also help foster collaboration among engineers and technologists with widely different knowledge bases. We get research out of its rabbit holes and engaged in a much more visible and interactive way.

Leverage the power of our brand-driven media channels to help you invent, innovate, and disrupt your respective market spaces in ways that help sustain your continued progress. If that’s for you, then please join us!

See our writers’ guidelines here.