one of the journals we host requires reader accounts, as some content is subscription-only, but all new accounts are registered by the journal manager. Visitors can not create their own accounts, for any role.
However, once a person was registered as a reader by the journal manager, they can give themselves the additional role of author and/or reviewer if they go to View Profile and find the Roles tab in the Backend. I can see why there’s no harm in changing your role for a journal that allows users to register their own accounts, but this feels like a bug. Can this be changed?
This sort of ties in with a problem brought up in this topic on disabling the submission option, because readers can submit articles, which they should not be allowed to. Has there been any progress on that one? I checked for it in the issues assigned to 3.1.2.5 and 3.2, but it doesn’t seem to be there.
Because readers can currently submit articles, being able to change their role to author/reviewer doesn’t have much of an effect, but they’re not meant to be able to do that in the first place.
If you have a journal that does not allow submissions, edit the section settings for all sections. In the section settings you can select that only editors can send in submissions to that section. Once all sections have that setting enabled, ordinary users can not submit to the journal.
The other topic is about having a “master switch” for the same thing that would also hide the Send a manuscript -buttons.
thanks for the tip - it’s an easy trick to stop people from submitting when they’re not meant to be able to do so!
However, this doesn’t adress my original problem of readers being able to change their roles in journals that don’t allow creating your own account. Admittedly a journal that uses the editorial workflow, but doesn’t allow authors to sign up by themselves is probably quite rare, but it still seems odd to me that OJS allows this.
Have you checked the role settings from Users & Roles > Roles > Author > Edit
There is a “Allow user self-registration” setting there. Not 100% sure if that prevents users from changing to that role or only registering. Should of course.