We are well into 2019 now and the rate of submission to Engineering Archive continues to increase (check out our stats!). With this increased submission rate, we have also seen an increase in spam. We try to catch these as quickly as possible and remove them, but using a post-moderation process means that the spam gets shared publicly on our social media accounts before being caught. Therefore, to help mitigate this, we will be shifting Engineering Archive to a pre-moderation process. This means that all submissions will be reviewed prior to being publicly shared. This will result in a small delay between submission and public availability/social media sharing, but we will work to keep this delay to a minimum.

At the same time, we are rolling out a new feature which will allow authors to request withdrawal of posted preprints. While we expect these requests to be rare, there are circumstances where it is appropriate to take down a preprint in order to comply with copyright policies and other requirements. When the request is made, authors will be asked to provide a reason for the withdrawal which will be reviewed by a moderator. Once the withdrawal is processed, the preprint file will be removed and it will be replaced with a page containing the title, authors, and reason provided for withdrawal. This page will serve as a landing page for any future visitors looking for the preprint.

More information about this and other Engineering Archive policies can be found on our guidelines page or our FAQ page. Happy preprinting!