PLoS Biology Migration to Ambra/Topaz

Yesterday, we migrated PLoS Biology to the Ambra/Topaz platform. This completed a two year, 5 journal, ~9000 article migration involving many of the PLoS staff. Now all of the PLoS journals have the same feature set including notes, comments, ratings, article impact metrics, etc. Migrating all of the PLoS journals to a single platform is a major milestone for PLoS and will allow us to finally create cross-journal features such as cross-journal search.

We released a snapshot version of Ambra to production just before the PLoS Biology migration that fixed a number of bugs that were uncovered with the PLoS Medicine migration in March. These bug fixes will likely be unnoticed by most users.

We also standardized our environments for performance testing of the Ambra/Topaz platform in Amazon EC2. The development team created scripts to automate the launch of the Ambra/Topaz platform in the Amazon “cloud” with a snapshot of our production data. We will continue working on these scripts so that others to easily launch Ambra/Topaz instances and test the platform (stay tuned for more info).

Liz has provided a bit more information on migration at the everyONE blog.