Anonymisation author's data

Publishing Practices
1

Hello PKP Team, I have a question about OJS 3.5.
Is it possible in this version to anonymise the author in front of a session or guest editor? I mean situations where the journal manager or main editor wants to hide the author’s personal data from other editors to ensure that editorial decisions are made purely based on ethics.
If this is possible in version 3.5, could you please tell me where I can find it?
Regards,
Ela Nazaruk

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2

Hi @enazaruk,

We offer some advice on this here:
https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/learning-ojs/editorial-workflow/en/review#prepare-for-review

But I don’t know about editors anonymizing from Guest Editors, though. It would depend on what level of permissions the Guest Editor was granted. Typically such information is hidden from reviewers, but not necessarily editors, from what I’ve seen. But perhaps you could explain your use case further?

-Roger
PKP Team

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4

Hi Roger,
Thank you for the advice.
I will try to explain what exactly the problem is.
I received this question from the editorial staff of one of our journals (https://ph.pollub.pl/). The editor-in-chief wants to avoid cronyism or any other conflicts of interest between section or guest editors, and authors when deciding which articles to include in a given issue.
For instance, if we have three peer-reviewed articles from the same university, we will anonymise the authors to prevent favouritism and ensure that everyone has an equal chance of having their article assigned to a particular issue.
It is the first time I have met such a problem, which is why I was looking for a resolution.
Best!
Ela

5

Hi @enazaruk,

Thanks for explaining your use case further.

In OJS, typically, anyone assigned as an Editor or Section Editor on a submission can normally see the author metadata in the workflow. The anonymity settings (single‑blind, double‑anonymous, etc.) only control what details reviewers and authors can see about each other - not what editors see.

That said, some possible workarounds for you might be:

  1. Keep the “blinded editor” that you want to hide the author details from as a Reviewer rather than a Section Editor and use a double‑anonymous review method so they do not see author information. They can still provide a recommendation via the review form, which the real editor can then use to make the decision. This might be kind of tricky though, in case, in other instances, you may wish the Editor to see the relevant information, and, in some instances (such as those that you’ve noted above), you may not.

  2. Have the Managing Editor or Editor‑in‑Chief handle the submission through review and decision, and only assign the Section Editor at copyediting or production, after any need for blinding has been done. You could even create a customized role that limits access to those particular stages.

I don’t see an easy way to do this within the current constraints of OJS. You might want to experiment with a few of these options with some test submissions to see if it might work. Others from the community may also wish to weigh in if they’ve encountered this situation before.

-Roger

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