About the Journal

Focus and Scope

PROTO - from Ancient Greek proto - or protos - meaning "first," superlative of pro - meaning "before."

Proto-Type is an online journal of undergraduate research and scholarship for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland. When first conceived, Proto-Type provided a venue for senior engineering undergraduate students to make lasting contributions to the public literature, and for most of these students, it was their first experience at seeing their work published in a publicly available, digital format.

Proto-Type has since been reimagined as a forum for first-year undergraduate engineering students to learn how the writing process works. Each document that appears in this journal will have undergone drafting, review, revisions, and other stages typical of the academic publishing process. As with a reputable journal, not all submissions will be selected for publication.

It is hoped that Proto-Type will allow first-year engineering students to participate in academic writing without the economic and time constraints that are unfortunate hallmarks of the publishing process. Additionally, this experience will give students an opportunity to do preliminary research on a topic that interests them and perhaps have that work made public, building a publication record even before graduation. For some students, it will introduce the concept of peer review, which is a useful skill beyond the world of academic publishing.  

Proto-Type, as a journal for undergraduate engineering students who do not yet have a discipline-specific major, will cover a broad range of engineering topics. However, they will all be the same genre of paper: a literature review. Each article will endeavour to fill a gap in the literature by reading existing knowledge on the topic. Articles published in Proto-Type will use a version of IEEE formatting as specified in the Author Guidelines document. Issues of this journal will be published three times per year following the three university semesters.

Peer Review Process

The goal of this journal is to expose student engineers to the academic publishing process. While the published papers in this journal are reviewed, the reviewers will be fellow undergraduate students, graduate students acting as teaching assistants, and course instructors. Therefore, while a review of each document has taken place, the published articles in Proto-Type cannot be said to be "peer reviewed" in the traditional sense.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.