New Editor and privacy of previous peer reviews

Software Support
1

A new editor is taking over and there are articles in OJS that he previously submitted.

Is the only way to hide the reviewer identities and their comments from the new editor is to delete them?

Many thanks for a best-practise for this situation.

Adam

2

Hi @rufusbecker,

What release of OJS are you using? (Please include this with your posts.)

We don’t currently have a comprehensive solution to this, and for the moment we recommend using the Section Editor role (rather than Editor/Journal Manager) as it only permits access to submissions to which the user has been assigned. However, if this is to be your editor in chief, that may not be a good work-around.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Thank you for your reply, Alec.

We are using version 2.4.8.0. I will make sure this included in future posts.

Adam

4

Hi @rufusbecker

I did this plugin a little over year ago: GitHub - ajnyga/hideEditorOwnArticles: Plugin for Open Journal Systems 2.4x. If one of the journal editors have submitted an article of their own, this plugin will hide all review related information regarding that article.

However, this is a problem that can not be solved 100%. There are always loopholes that an editor can use simply because the editor can use functions like “login as” or create new user accounts (for example a new editor account).

The complete solution would probably need some major changes to the whole OJS software, but the bottom line is, I think, that you almost always need an user account that can do anything. This is one suggestion on how to solve this: New role (permission level) to to solve a central problem in OJS

1 Like
5

Thank you @ajnyga

I will check the forum post and your plugin. There is always a reliance on the editor to act in good faith not use their position to violate the double-blind requirements, but this problem in OJS pushes that expectation a little harder.

Best,

Adam