TechRxiv

TechRxiv is the preprint server the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) launched on January 29, 2020, for unpublished research in engineering, computer science, and related technology. It runs on a platform-as-a-service arrangement with Figshare (the underlying platform is reachable at techrxiv.figshare.com), the same model a number of institutional and funder preprint services use rather than building bespoke hosting infrastructure. Posting is free to authors, and TechRxiv assigns each accepted preprint its own persistent identifier and DOI, separate from any DOI the eventual peer-reviewed version of record will carry.

Where a multidisciplinary server like arXiv covers physics, mathematics, and computer science under community-run, discipline-specific moderation, TechRxiv is narrower and publisher-specific: it is IEEE’s own venue, scoped to the engineering and computing fields IEEE itself publishes in, and it is moderated by IEEE rather than by a subject-matter community board. That distinction matters for a research office cataloguing where a lab’s outputs are likely to land — an engineering preprint is as likely to be findable on TechRxiv as on a general-purpose server, and the two are not interchangeable for discovery purposes.

Moderation and screening

Every submission to TechRxiv is screened by a moderator before it is posted. That review confirms the manuscript is a genuine, appropriately-scoped, non-plagiarized piece of research writing that fits TechRxiv’s subject areas — it is explicitly not a technical peer review, and it does not assess the accuracy, completeness, methodological soundness, or novelty of the findings. Readers should treat anything posted to TechRxiv, like any preprint, as not-yet-validated by the peer review process, regardless of how polished or complete it appears.

Licensing, copyright, and identifiers

Authors retain copyright of work they post to TechRxiv and choose from several Creative Commons licenses at submission, including CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC0. Each accepted preprint receives a DOI, which authors can cite immediately and which persists independent of whatever happens to the manuscript afterward — withdrawal, revision, or eventual publication elsewhere.

Relationship to IEEE journal and conference submission

Posting a manuscript to TechRxiv before or during submission to an IEEE journal or conference is generally compatible with IEEE’s own prior-publication rules, consistent with the wider norm among scholarly publishers that a preprint is not a prior publication (see CASRAI’s guide on avoiding a prior-publication conflict for the general principle and its conditions). Individual IEEE journals and transactions can set their own specific preprint policies and conditions on top of that general position, so authors and research offices should check the target venue’s own author guidelines rather than assume a single IEEE-wide rule covers every case.

How TechRxiv differs from other preprint servers

For a research administrator advising authors on where to post, the useful contrast is: TechRxiv is IEEE’s own, publisher-run server for engineering and computer science, similar in structure to how a scholarly society or publisher runs its own branded preprint venue in other fields (compare, for example, ChemRxiv’s chemistry-specific, society-run model against bioRxiv’s). That is different from a generalist, community-moderated server like arXiv, and different again from a shared infrastructure model like OSF Preprints, where a single backend hosts many independently branded, community-run servers. See CASRAI’s guides on how to choose a preprint server and what preprint servers are and how they work for the broader landscape TechRxiv sits within, and how to cite a preprint for citation formats across servers including TechRxiv.