Our editors are finding our reviewer request emails to be problematic. Prospective reviewers seem to not get the emails.
Is there a way in the OJS system to check that reviewer requests are going out and/or to CC the editor on those requests? It feels like our messages are not going through or we are suddenly experiencing a high number of reviewer rejections (without getting a rejection email back).
We are using Open Journal Systems 3.4.0.7.
Thank you,
Jennifer Rumford
hi @jrumford,i’m afraid the ojs can’t check whether the reviewer received the email,you can log in to your emailbox to check if the email has been sent.
Hi @jrumford,
Within OJS, you can check your Submission Activity Log:
Our docs also provide some guidance on this:
If the user can find no record whatsoever of the email being filtered as spam or junk, you may be encountering a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) validation problem with their server. You can confirm this by viewing your server’s mail log to see if there are any reported receipt blockages/returns with SPF validation errors as the result.
https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/admin-guide/3.3/en/email
Depending on your level of access/familiarity with your server environment, you may need assistance from a systems administrator with this.
-Roger
PKP Team
Some of our editors will send a prospective reviewer an email first outside of the system and ask them to review a manuscript. If they agree, then the editor will send them the request through the system (and also let them know to check their spam folder). We usually get a higher response rate doing it this way, but then the messages are not recorded in the system.
Great idea! I will suggest this to our editors as a matter of policy.
I think it is happening too often for us to be running into SPF. I will go through your information and see if we can get things moving. Thank you!
It is happening so much that I have to think we are not sending. Everyone in the world can’t be blocking our emails … 
Hi @jrumford,
If any emails at all are being delivered, then your SMTP configuration is correct; inconsistent delivery is a very common symptom of SPF misconfiguration. I think reviewing and completing your SPF configuration is the likely solution.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Thank you - we will be checking our configuration. Are there any directions for how to do this? Unfortunately, the staff person who started our OJS account had to step down and we have new personnel in place.
Hi @jrumford,
The good news is that this is sort of a more general server administration task than an OJS-specific task. The configuration options for OJS email delivery that will be relevant are all in the config.inc.php configuration file in the [email] section, and these mostly relate to the SMTP configuration, which it seems is correct in your case.
As for SPF, that’s managed outside of OJS configuration, typically in your nameserver configuration toolset. A general purpose sysadmin should be able to find where to work with that.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
One of our editors realized that some of our editors had the wrong email in place. In OJS it has to be username followed by @[palaeo-electronica.org] our domain. So this was really painful, but I think we have worked it out! Thanks!