Citing OpenChip

If OpenChip designed a device that appears in a paper, cite the software and state the version.

BibTeX

@software{openchip,
title   = {OpenChip: browser-based microfluidic chip design for resin printing},
author  = {Cimoca, Julian},
year    = {2026},
version = {0.1.0},
url     = {https://wateract.org}
}

A CITATION.cff ships with the repository, which GitHub and several reference managers read directly. It is the authoritative version of the above, and the block here is generated from the same domain constant the rest of the site uses — so it always names the URL this wiki is actually being served from.

Note

openchip.tech is the intended home. The project is currently served from wateract.org while that domain is being arranged. Cite the URL you actually used; the old one will redirect after the move.

A DOI

There is no DOI yet. The usual route is to archive a release on Zenodo, which mints one per release and gives you a stable citation that resolves to the exact version used.

Worth doing before the first paper that depends on the tool.

What to state alongside the citation

More important than the citation itself. A reader should be able to reproduce your device, and a version number alone does not get them there.

The design file. A .openchip file is plain JSON and is the complete, unambiguous description of the device — geometry, dimensions, ports, and the printer profile it was checked against. Deposit it as supplementary material. It is a few kilobytes.

The printer and resin. Machine, resin brand and product, layer height and exposure. These affect the printed dimensions more than anything in the design file.

The measured dimensions. Not the drawn ones. A channel drawn at 0.4 mm may print at 0.34 mm, and that difference changes the pressure by about 40 %. See Resolution vs. channel size.

Post-processing. Wash solvent and duration, post-cure time and wavelength, bonding method. All of them affect the surface and the leachables.

Citing the estimates

Be careful here.

The flow figures OpenChip reports are one-dimensional analytical estimates, not simulation results. Presenting them as simulation would misrepresent them.

If you quote a pressure drop or a Reynolds number, say what it is: an analytical estimate from Hagen–Poiseuille generalised to non-circular ducts, assuming fully developed laminar flow and no entrance or bend losses. See The limits of analytical estimates.

If a claim in the paper depends on the number, measure it.

Citing a template

The templates are recreations of published geometries, built from device descriptions with dimensions chosen to print on a desktop machine. They are not reproductions and their dimensions are not any paper’s dimensions.

Cite the original work for the geometry, and OpenChip for the implementation.

This matters most for the herringbone, which is a planar chevron interpretation rather than the published staggered herringbone mixer — the real device’s floor ridges cannot be expressed by a planar channel graph. Describing what you printed as a staggered herringbone mixer would be wrong. Its caveat says so in the app, and it says so here.