I am writing here with regards to an issue which I have found while working with OJS (I am using 3.1.2-4).
In order to create a website for an “old”, existing journal, I had to upload all the info about the past issues with QuickSubmit (but I will probably have to keep doing this for the next issues). In some cases, some authors have published many articles, since the Journal has a very long history behind.
So, here is the problem I have found and which a bit scares me, regarding to the “authors” info. If I decide to update the info about an author in the metadata of a published issue, they will not apply of course to all the others issues where the same author is present, but only to that one.
This is understandable, and I thought that I could solve this by creating users, as authors, and then assign them to the published issues. But, no…! It seems that this is not possible, unfortunately.
In other words, it is not possible, with QuickSubmit to assign articles to existing users of the website. This is a bit a disaster for me, since I will have to manually change info for about hundreds of articles then!
Not only: I have also noticed that if the info about the authors differ from one article to the author (for example the affiliation, the biography or any other one), the plugin “Most read articles by the same author/s” doesn’t work anymore, as it does not recognize the articles anymore by the same authors…
This is, however, a situation that can commonly presents itself: it can happen that an author change Institution, within the years, but still the articles belong to him!
I am sorry for this long topic. I hope at least to contribute a bit to the understanding of OJS functioning.
So thank you very much for your kind attention, and with my best regards
Leonardo
Hi @asmecher,
I am sorry to bother you with this, but I thought to reformulate the question more briefly: with QuickSubmit I cannot assign a new article to an existing user, am I right?
Thank you very much
Leonardo
Using QuickSubmit, the submission “belongs” to the user who works with the QuickSubmit plugin, although they can of course designate whatever authors they want for the scholarly record – e.g. an Editor entering a few back issues manually. Once the submission is complete, the editor can look up the submission in the normal workflow and assign other people to the authorship workflow by using the “Participants” list on the right-hand side of the submission’s workflow area.
As for author disambiguation, it is intentionally done that way – we really can’t assume that John Smith is the same person working at Harvard as another John Smith working at McGill. That approach to disambiguation is something we will never get right; the only way to get it correct is to adopt a disambiguating identifer, such as ORCID. So the current author list isn’t something we’ll be putting much work into, as it’s flawed by design, until we can confidently say that ORCID adoption (or equivalent) is enough for us to rely on that instead.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
first of all, thank you very much for your answer and for the explanations. On a theoretical level, I have understood the situation you have described me. I also agree about the need to use ORCID identifiers, which I am trying to do as well.
However, I still have some practical uncertainty. Let’s say I am the Editor who is entering back issues manually (which is exactly the case, by the way):
I log in with my admin account, I create an issue and I publish it;
I go to “QuickSubmit” plugin and I upload the first article. On the “author” field I add the name, the email, the orcid identifier, the Affiliation, the country, etc., of the real article’s author;
I add the galley (Pdf article file) and I publish the article.
This is what I have done until now. Today, I am trying to follow these next steps:
I go to “Submissions” > “Archives” and I recognize the article which I have just uploaded
I expand it and then I click on “View submissions”
On the right sidebar, under “Participants” I click on “assign”
I select an user I created, before this list of actions, as an author.
Once I get there, I am a bit blocked. Meaning, I don’t see any changes on the article front-end page on the website, as the system is still retrieving the informations which I added before during step 2, in the QuikcSubmit procedure.
What I would like, is that the website would display the info of the participant I have assigned as an author, not the one I have inserted from QuickSubmit. Why? Because in that way, I will be able to edit and control those author’s infos only from one page (the page of his user profile, which I created), and not from all the single articles metadata.
Since the Journal has a very long history, there are authors who wrote even more than 30 articles. In this case, I would need to spend a huge amount of time in order to edit their data, if needed: in fact, I would need to enter each article metadatas and edit the relevant author infos (for example the Biography text, or their email address). It means that I will have to do this operations 30 times, furthermore hoping to not make any mistakes; however, if I could manage to edit once for all the author’s info, only from its user profile settings, I would be saved instead.
I hope I managed to express myself in a comprehensible way. Please let me know if not, I could try to reformulate more briefly.
Thank you very much for your kind help and support.
Best regards
Leonardo
Editing a user account should never change the publication record for submissions that have already been published – that’s done intentionally. If an author changes their name, or affiliation, the metadata for already-published content should continue to reflect the old data.
Can you describe your workflow a little more? Why not enter the author’s information in the QuickSubmit plugin? If you’re doing batch data entry, have you looked at the XML import options?
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Again thank you for all the explanations and your time.
Yes, I understand that an author info should not be edited retrospectively but should reflect the status quo ante. The only “problem” which arises is that the “most read articles by the same author” doesn’t show the articles anymore: even if an author changed affiliation, the article still belongs to him…
In this specific case, in any case, I am referring to a retired author. I already uploaded his articles in the different issues. Then, in the last week he created an Orcid identifier, which he didn’t have before. Now, I should enter all the articles metadata, one by one, to manually add ,for each of them, this new info about the Orcid identifier.
I hope that I had expressed myself a bit more clearly. However, don’t worry. I think I have understood what you have explained me about the functioning of the system. If I could, I would like to highlight only that the fact that different infos about an author, in theory, should not imply that the “most read article by the same author” plugin would not reach to display the articles.
However, thanks again for all this great work, I am very admired towards this.
With best regards,
Leonardo
Oh, I think it is a very good option to add existing users to articles uploaded by quick submit. In the workflow I have assigned a user as an author by using “Participants” Unfortunately I have tried it and it does not work. What can I be doing wrong?
On the other hand, I speak of another situation.
I upload an article by quick submit and add an author in “Add Contributor”
In the future that author registers and publishes an article with the complete workflow.
I edit in “Add Contributor” and add the same name, email and ORCID as the existing user
Would "Recommend Articles by Author" show all articles? Would OJS still be two authors?