Acceptance date in XML import - OJS 3.1.2.1

Hello all,

is there a way to include the acceptance date of an article (or the date_decided, as it shows up in the database) in the XML import file?

Two of the journals we host on our OJS are trying to get accepted by the Web of Science and our contact person at WoS has asked us to provide the submission, acceptance, and publication date for future articles. Although the output of these dates on the article landing pages is not currently a criteria for being accepted into WoS, it does appear that it will become one in the future.

Our problem is that neither of these journals use the full workflow on OJS and just provide us with the finished article PDFs, which we upload using the Quick Submit Plugin, which does not generate a date_decided in the database. We would like to avoid having to put the already finished articles through the long submission progress just to generate an acceptance date (which we would then have to manually change to the correct date in the database anyway) and rather upload the articles via the native XML import with the already correct submission and acceptance dates. Can the acceptance date be included in the XML file? If so, how and where exactly? All of the native XML exports we’ve pulled from our OJS only show a published and submitted date, even if they have a date_decided in the database.

The next step will be getting the three dates to show on the article landing page… we’ve found the plugin by ajnyga and will try and get that to work for us once we have acceptance dates to work with, but an official plugin would be really helpful at this point, especially if this becomes a WoS criteria!

(I’ve heard rumours the old Quick Submit Plugin allowed users to manually set a submission date - any chance of getting that function back, along with an option for acceptance date?)

Many thanks!
Pia