When Google killed Google Reader back in 2013, many saw it as the beginning of the end for RSS feeds on the web. In many cases, those predictions have come true as most people consume their web content primarily through various private channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But we at engrXiv are not ready to give up on RSS just yet! If you visit the engrXiv homepage today, you’ll see new links in the right column for our RSS feeds. Subscribe to one of these feeds and you can receive and you can receive updates of new preprints posted to engrXiv delivered right to your favorite feed reader. Now that’s convenient!

Of course, if you are no longer regularly using an RSS feed these days, our RSS feeds also provide the backend to all of the other venues you may visit to obtain your regular dose of new engineering research. These options include: Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, and Matrix.

For authors who started with Engineering Archive on the Open Science Framework, we wanted to address a few possible questions you may have about the transition to the new platform. We know that this transition may cause frustration for some users, but we hope you are as excited as we are about possibilities for development the new platform will give us. Any of you who have worked with a journal published on the Open Journal Systems platform in the past will find engrXiv’s new interface familiar. If at any time you are unsure about something or need help, email us at info@engrxiv.org for assistance.

Preprints and postprints

Your preprints and postprints have been migrated to the new server. We have attempted to preserve as much metadata as possible during the import, such as license, keywords, download counts, etc. However, some of this information is not currently being displayed on the new preprint pages until we can add that functionality to Open Preprint Systems. Shortly, your preprints will be “withdrawn” from the Open Science Framework to remove them from that platform.

Links/URLs/DOIs

Your preprints/postprints will have new URLs of the format engrxiv.org/preprint/view/####. We have preserved the legacy URLs which had the format engrxiv.org/123ab and redirected those to the new URL scheme. Your DOIs will remain unchanged and will continue to resolve to your preprints/postprints now located at the new URLs. The engrXiv social media accounts used links of the form osf.io/123ab. These links will continue to work for a short time, but will eventually point to a “tombstone” page on the Open Science Framework, which will provide a link to the new server. If you used the osf.io link anywhere, we recommend that you update it.

User accounts | REQUIRES ATTENTION

The primary aspect requiring attention for our legacy users is your user account. Due to data privacy issues and the Open Science Framework Terms of Service, we were not able to migrate your account to the new server. However, if you verify the ownership of your OSF account with us, we can connect your new engrXiv account with your existing preprints. The process if unfortunately manual, but you can start here.

Engineering Archive is excited to announce that the server has moved from to a new hosting provider and server platform, Open Preprint Systems (OPS) hosted by PKP Publishing Services (PKP|PS).

Engineering Archive was launched in 2016 on the Open Science Framework (Center for Open Science). For the past five and a half years, we have seen strong growth of the server as an open access repository for engineering scholarship. We are grateful to the Center for Open Science for providing a home for the server in these first years of service.

Our new home with PKP|PS will provide Engineering Archive with greater financial security and improved user management and unites us with the vibrant open-source community developing OPS (built on the same framework as the popular Open Journal Systems software). We must also thank the staff at PKP for their assistance in preparing the server for migration to this new platform.

We hope that you’ll continue to read the work posted on engrXiv and share your own scholarship with us to make it freely accessible to anyone, anywhere.

About Engineering Archive Engineering Archive is the preprint/postprint server for engineering, funded and operated by Open Engineering Inc. The server aims to enable the open dissemination of engineering scholarship, accessible to all.

About Public Knowledge Project

Based at Simon Fraser University and Stanford University, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a multi-university initiative developing free open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. Open Journal Systems (OJS), PKP’s flagship open source publishing platform, is currently employed by over 25,000 scholarly journals to publish in 56 languages worldwide.