OJS: how can guest editors be assigned to special journal issues?

Software Support
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Hi,

We are using OJS for the management of the publication workflow of our journal. So far, our journal has been accepting submissions without categorizing them. Now, we’re investigating how we could distinguish between “research articles” and “project/tool notes”. From what I read in the documentation, this should be done with “sections” in OJS. So far, so good. Only, so far, we’ve been (mis?)using sections to define journal issues, making it possible to:

  • group articles for one issue in a dedicated section
  • assign guest editors for special issues (sections) when needed

Yet, when sections are used to define journal issues, it becomes impossible to further categorize submissions into other sections.

I’ve been experimenting in a development environment with redefining new “proper” sections (“research article” / “project/tool note”) and using the OJS issue publication mechanism to group articles into journal issues. This goes well up to the point where I want to assign guest editors to special journal issues. In fact, I’m beginning to see why the previous “unorthodox” approach (defining issues as sections) had been adopted; indeed, if if I understand correctly, this approach had been recommended in a previous post in this forum, see https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2567#p41897.

So, against this background, my question is simple: how should guest editors for special issues be assigned and managed in OJS?

Best,

Ron

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Hi @rvdb,

Currently you’ll need to use the distinction between Editors (who have access to all submissions) and Section Editors (who can only access what they’ve been assigned to). These assignments are either created manually, or in the case of submissions that come into sections with only a single Section Editor assigned to it, created automatically. This will leave the onus of assignments to the Editor; currently we haven’t developed support for the workflow you describe beyond that.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Ok, thanks for confiming, @asmecher. A mechanism for assigning section editors to an issue would be a great addition to OJS, then.

Best,

Ron

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The above link https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2567#p41897 is broken but the discussion behind this link is still useful because there, user ‘soeren’ neatly described the requirements for managing special issues with guest editors (which would still be useful for us as well!). So here is a link to the contribution in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160822014307/https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2567

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