Thanks to a new collaboration between the the Center for Open Science and Overleaf announced yesterday, authors who draft their papers on Overleaf can now submit them directly to engrXiv from the Overleaf website. For those of you who are not familiar with Overleaf, it is a free service that lets you create, edit, and share your scientific ideas easily online using LaTeX right within your web browser. LaTeX takes care of the typesetting and formatting for you and Overleaf keeps you from having to install and configure LaTeX yourself.

Submitting couldn’t be easier. Once you are finished authoring your paper on Overleaf, just click the “Journals & Services” tab at the top of the page, scroll down and select engrXiv.

On the next window click, “Submit Article to engrXiv” and you are all set.

We are really excited about this collaboration and how easy it makes it to get your article up on engrXiv as soon as it is ready.

Happy writing!

Are you a researcher who conducts multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary work? Then using a preprint server hosted on the Open Science Framework is for you! In addition to great features such as the ability to upload multiple files and file types, OSF enables a preprint to be simultaneously posted to multiple archives. For now this includes engrXiv for engineering, SocArXiv for the social sciences, and PsyArXiv for the psychological sciences.

Thus if you do work that is appropriate for both engrXiv and SocArXiv, for example, you can post it to both by simply adding both relevant tags to the preprint’s page. The preprint will then be listed on both archives while pointing to the same page and will therefore be easily discoverable and accessible to members of both disciplines.

A few people have asked the question, “Why is it called engrXiv?” This is a great question and the answer requires a little backstory.

First is the “engr” part. While there is not really a standard to broadly accepted abbreviation for engineering, engr. is often used and can be found in places like course prefixes at universities. Therefore, engr is a good option to avoid confusion with eng., which is sometimes used as an abbreviation for English.

Next is the “rXiv” part. This form of spelling for the word archive is best known in its use on the website arXiv. arXiv is a preprint server for physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics that started in 1991. Though commonly written with a capital letter “X” for ease of typing, the pronunciation uses a Greek letter chi (χ), stemming from its use in TeX (or 𝜏𝜀𝜒), the typesetting system. The convention of using this spelling has been carried on in the preprint server realm by entities such as bioRxiv and SocArXiv.

Putting this all together, we took these two parts and smashed them together, while eliminating the double “r”, to form engrXiv, pronounced “Engineering Archive.” We hope that with time as the engrXiv community grows, the name and pronunciation will become commonplace and not require explanation.

To help avoid confusion, if you tell your colleagues to visit www.engineeringarchive.org they will also find their way to engrXiv. ;-)